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

I will come back to the Deputy on that in just a moment. I do not remember that. On our targeted delivery, they are high targets. They have increased again for this year by an extra 2,000 homes. It is very important that the targets are getting higher each year. Because they are programmed over the four quarters to build into the last quarter, as happened last year, new builds will catch up. The Deputy asked about my confidence that they will catch up again this year. I have high confidence that they will. In all these things, we recognise that we want the local authorities to be building the houses and doing the delivery, so they are independent of me. If we do not make it, it will not be due to a fault in the Department. It will be because something happened on the local authority side. That is not to shift the blame but just to recognise that we say we want local authorities delivering houses and if a local authority fails to deliver on its target, that is the local authority. Due to the work we are doing with local authorities to help them and because of the constant oversight that we have, I have high confidence we will reach our targets. I will be reporting on that in January. The Deputy used the phrase "sluggish growth". In 2014, 400 homes were built for social housing and this year it is more than 6,000. I do not think that growth is sluggish. If we were operating in the private sector and achieving that kind of growth in housing delivery, it would be quite phenomenal. It is phenomenal in terms of what local authorities have done, coming from almost nothing to quite something indeed. It is an increase of 2,000 on last year which will increase again next year and continue increasing.

The breakdown on the turnkeys is just coming now. I will have it in a moment. On HAP, interestingly, the targets for build were lower until I increased the build target by 30%. I did increase the targets and we got the extra funding to increase them. In fact, the ratios might have been even worse. We will see that dependence on HAP coming down below 10,000 as the social housing stock increases above 12,000.

We are going to shift away from that dependency but the initial build target under Rebuilding Ireland was lower and we increased it.

The Deputy is correct that some of the new HAPs are going to people who are on rent supplement but going from rent supplement to HAP means something different for the tenants involved because of the flexibility and supports they have. Unlike rent supplement, we believe it meets the household need as it is defined. Had we not done that with HAP, the tenants in question might have been out of housing altogether. While I take the Deputy's point that such people are perhaps not leaving the property they were in, it would have been a different scenario for them had we not stepped in with HAP. We have always been clear and transparent about the percentage of HAPs that are going to people who are coming from rent supplement.

Work was done on the impact of HAP tenancies on the market. People in receipt of HAPs represent a small percentage of the overall rental sector. I am concerned that there might be too much of a concentration of HAPs in a particular area and what that might do to the local rental yield. We continue to look at that on a case-by-case basis. People have expressed concerns to me that all the new apartments that are coming online will be taken up by those in receipt of HAP. Those people have concerns about others who have housing insecurity but they are also concerned about getting homes for themselves. I have heard those points being made and it is something on which we are constantly keeping an eye. We also keep an eye on the percentage of HAP uplifts, the number of HAPs using the 20% flexibility option, or a portion thereof, and the homeless HAPs availing of the 50% option.

Fewer than 1,000 of the 6,500 homes that will be provided for social housing will happen through the turnkey mechanism. I do not have a breakdown of those that were commissioned from plans versus those that might have been taken later on in the process. We tell local authorities not to compete with first-time buyers and we are quite clear on that.