Darragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

We have received housing delivery plans from every local authority in the country. In the Custom House, our housing delivery team, which deals with affordable and social housing, is working through those plans with each local authority. Next week and the week after, I will have housing summits with all 31 chief executives and their directors of services for housing and planning. The affordable housing fund is open for calls now. We have expanded further our cost rental offering through the cost rental equity loan, CREL, 2. Under that call, I have signed off on a series of additional projects and it will deliver hundreds more cost rental projects this year. We are going through proposals that we have already received from some local authorities for advanced purchase arrangements for affordable purchase. I expect the LDA, through Project Tosaigh, to work through a number of proposals that it has received on activating dormant planning permissions while focusing that development on affordable and social housing.

We have different funding streams working together to deliver social homes at a level that we have never seen before. This is the 9,000 new builds out of the 11,820 that we want to deliver this year, made up by acquisition and leasing. On the affordable housing side, we are targeting 4,100 homes this year while building up the capacity to reach an average of 6,000 over the course of the plan. I believe that we can do more than that. There is immense potential in cost rental in particular.