Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 18 June 2019

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government

Affordable Housing: Discussion

Mr. Jim Baneham:

There is no hard split at this stage.

The next question was on whether the Housing Agency is still buying land or property. We are not buying land. The land we have was transferred through the land aggregation scheme or through the NBA, which we effectively absorbed.

We are buying property. We are buying housing under Rebuilding Ireland. I will not talk too much about that but it is actively happening under the €70 million fund. We also do some specific work for local authorities in regard to homelessness provision.

With regard to getting a national inventory of the agency's land, it is in a couple of places. Rebuilding Ireland has a map on a website and one can look at more than 700 parcels of land owned by local authorities. The Housing Agency's land is a subdivision of that. It is on the website so one can go to any local authority area and see what we have by clicking a little icon. We also have a document. I was just checking our website, which I probably should not have been doing. I cannot find out where it is; it has changed in the past couple of days. We have put on it a strategic development management plan that covers all our lands and gives quite a bit of detail on each site. That is available for anybody to download.

I will let the NDFA talk about the cost of finance.

With regard to the point on there being no joined-up plan, while we consider individual sites, the high-level framework exists under the legislation. The regulations are partially in place and the rest will be in place in the autumn. That is a framework in respect of approaching affordability regarding purchases.

With regard to cost rental, we are at an earlier stage. It is a pilot stage. The policies are still not developed but there will be a framework in place. I hope it will make that a bit clearer in due course.

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