Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The project would have come from the local authority. Somebody was telling me about a particular design scheme going back and forth 11 times between the Departments. I launched those houses and they were fantastic so it was obviously a good thing that they went through the checks and balances that they did so that we could get these great new homes built. There is a reason we do these things the way we do. There is a reason we worked with local authority chief executives to get the process down to 59 weeks because we saw that it could be improved and there is a reason I am now looking at the threshold for the State approval process to give greater flexibility to local authorities for smaller schemes.

The differential rent review has almost been completed and it will be brought forward shortly. I am confident we will meet our targets on student accommodation and it is quite important that we do because it takes pressure off other parts of the housing system. On the fast track process, 5,443 residential units, 2,665 of which were homes, have been granted permission. There were 2,778 apartments as part of that 5,443 and 4,479 student bed spaces. A total of 1,575 residential units were refused permission which consisted of 906 houses and 669 apartments. The fast track process has been very successful for getting large scale developments approved more quickly through the planning process which is great.

The repair and lease scheme or something like it will be great for the regeneration of towns and villages. There is a reason it is not working in towns and the villages. The urban and rural regeneration funds of €3 billion for the next ten years under Project Ireland 2040 might be the way we get there. I have been at some schemes that were privately led by people who are publicly known who have themselves taken on a property as their homes and encouraged a friend to do the same in the village. They have then turned a building into a business hub or a place where start ups can go. We have asked the local authorities to look at all of these initiatives to see how they can help. As I explained earlier, the repair and lease scheme requires a particular set of conditions to exist for an individual who owns the property before they might wish to bring it forward. We initially spoke about ten years for social housing and nobody came forward. We brought it down to five years for social housing but in certain parts of the country there might not be enough of a demand for social housing so it would not work under that scheme so we have to examine if there is something else that we can do instead. At the moment I have asked the Attorney General to look at the compulsory purchase order, CPO, powers to see if we can CPO local vacant homes and then sell them. We are not looking to CPO them for social housing but to sell them. Some local authorities are doing it but not all of them so I am getting advice from the Attorney General and we will issue that advice to every local authority to use their CPO powers. It is not a question of actually using the CPO but the threat thereof will get the house back onto the market for anyone who is able to buy it and that is what we want to achieve.

The rent pressure zone, RPZ, review was published in either May or June of this year. That is on our website. I made a note here that the potential loss of landlords is a concern because the Deputy said it as well. I have to find a balance in everything that I do so that when we strengthen protections for renters we also have to make sure that we are getting more people in to invest in rental property. This is not just people in Ireland buying one or two properties but institutional investors as well.

I have been talking to the Minister for Rural and Community Development, Deputy Ring, about rural relocation. It is something that Deputy Harty brought to my attention in my first few weeks in the job. The previous scheme was not that successful unfortunately because many people fell out of it and went back to the cities that they had come from. Much can be done and the Minister of State, Deputy Griffin, brought a proposal to me that I referenced earlier on as well that officials are looking at whereby people could live a short commute to somewhere like Tralee in a house that is currently vacant but in decent condition and some money could be made available to refurbish the house and bring it back into use. This would not necessarily be for people with social housing needs but for anyone and we are looking at that.

There have been 72 mortgage to rent scheme applications approved so far in 2018 but there are currently 845 in the system. On the HAP place finder service, 23 are now in place following requests from local authorities.