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

I will come to that. It is important to note that this is happening and a local authority is doing it. It does not mean that other local authorities cannot be doing it but, to help them, we set up the serviced sites fund and put additional money into it, following our engagement with Fianna Fáil in advance of the budget for this year. That is €310 million, as the Deputy knows. Money has already been allocated in the first round of funding and more will be allocated. We hope and expect work to commence this year although we will not see completions on local authority land from that fund this year, as it stands.

There are two things that are different about what we are now doing with the cost rental scheme. Cost rental might have been an ambition or an idea but we are now trying to do it at scale. After we met with Dublin City Council, I identified St. Michael's Estate as a site we could do at scale and deliver in an urban area where there is high demand for housing but it is out of reach for many people. The other difference is that we are partnering with the European Investment Bank, EIB, so this is a real, long-term scheme. This is not just a pilot scheme to see if it can work here. We are asking how to change the rental model in our country using a site where we can do it at scale and using a fund of finance we can afford and which is open to us because of the type of project we are doing. That makes it different and the key thing is to get it right. We have dedicated resources in the Department and Dublin City Council for it. As I said to Senator Boyhan, we are going to see more progress in the first quarter of this year but I also want to allocate more resources to it because of the importance of the project. We are discussing that at the moment.

What is affordable and what is not? We have looked at different models from the National Development Finance Agency, NDFA, as to people on different salary scales, calculating one third of their income and what kind of rent that might allow them to pay. We are trying to lock that in on each of the affordable sites that we are looking at. Nothing is final here because we are still progressing things. It will depend on the number of units, the different facilities that will be provided, who is involved, whether an assisted housing body, AHB, or a number of them and the level of financing from the EIB. There is no point in doing this if it is not going to actually be affordable. There is no point in starting this and saying that it is not affordable now but it will be 40% below the market rent in ten years' time. That is exactly what we are looking at now. We do not have final figures because the schemes are not yet at that stage. The NDFA has done a lot of work on this and, from what I have looked at, we are talking about affordable rent for people at particular salary points for individuals and couples, who can apply and the different thresholds that we can put in.

I looked at the table and it is not of great quality.