Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 31 January 2019
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government
Affordable Housing: Discussion
Mr. Jim Baneham:
I can provide a little more detail. I raised the land control point earlier. There was a degree of legal complexity when we did that. We put both leases and covenants in the transfer. The long-term use of the land has been confined to both social and cost-rental units. The length of lease is 150 years but the transfer goes beyond that in terms of time. There was a comment that it has been nearly ready for quite some time. Tenders came back in the late autumn of last year and they have been assessed. A designated contractor has been selected. Currently it is at a stage where we are trying to finalise the financing and funding side. The site has been successful in the serviced site submission and there was a meeting just yesterday to try to tease out the final element of that. There will be further meetings next week about trying to get funding. To reiterate what Mr. O'Connor said, there is keen focus to try to use the various tools available to try to make the initial rents as low as possible while at the same time financing the cost.
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