Mr. John McCarthy:

Yes, and in some respects I am glad the Deputy raised it. It is in no one's interest for local authorities to say that something takes two, three or four years while we say it does not. To deal with this, we recognised when we put Rebuilding Ireland in place that we were moving from a situation where local authority house building had virtually ground to a halt and we needed to move and ensure we could move from that situation to delivering the ambitious build programme for which Rebuilding Ireland provides. To position ourselves to do that, we agreed a programme with the local authority sector and that takes us all the way from the first thought of a social housing project to getting on site. We have mapped it versus best practice in private development, and it is a period of 59 weeks from first thought to getting on site. When we have spoken about that, I have heard some people saying that it takes 59 weeks for the Department to approve a project. When I say 59 weeks, I mean that is 59 weeks to design it, take it through the Part VIII process, take it through procurement, and get on site. There are four stages within that period of 59 weeks, and for each stage we have made commitments on how long projects will be with us. Of the 59 weeks in total, a project is with us for 15 weeks, and the remaining 44 weeks is for the design work by the local authorities, the Part VIII process, which takes a number of weeks of public consultation, and the procurement, which takes time.

From all our points of view, and I think the local authorities share this perspective now, our key requirement is that we have that timeline in place and adhere to it in order that we can push projects. It can be seen in the social housing construction status report which we publish quarterly. I think we have published six of those, the first of which was at the end of 2016. As each quarter goes by, therefore, it can be seen that the number of projects and houses in the programme is increasing and has increased substantially. Our key aim is to ensure that we honour our commitments as part of that process and local authorities do likewise to build houses for people.