Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for taking time from their busy schedules. I have a frustration in this regard. This committee has constantly been discussing dereliction and vacancy now for six years. The last Government's housing plan had a dedicated section and a whole pillar on vacancy and very ambitious targets, all of which were missed. We have discussed these issues for three years and I do not want to deride anybody's work and efforts but the words "progress" and "dereliction and vacancy" do not fit together in the same sentence on the basis of the actual delivery. What many of us in the committee would really like to hear is, under the seven existing streams for bringing vacant and derelict properties back into use, namely, buy and renew, repair and lease, ready to build, CPO activation, the refurbishment grant, the URDF €150 million fund and the planning exemptions, how many properties have been brought back into use for each year those schemes have been in place? I refer to the years 2020, 2021 and 2022. Are there actual targets for each of those schemes in 2023, 2024 and 2025? Were the committee to be given a simple table that shows delivery and future targets, that is how we would measure progress. I invite Ms Timmons to respond to that first question.

The second question is specifically about the refurbishment grant. We still hear about cases of banks refusing mortgage lenders permission to draw down their mortgages, despite the fact we were told by both the Department and Banking and Payments Federation Ireland, BPFI, that an agreement was reached with the pillar banks four to five weeks ago. This week alone, I heard from two households, not in my own constituency, that Avant Money and EBS are still refusing drawdowns, where people have mortgage approval and have approval under the grant. Will the Department give us information as to why banks are still refusing drawdowns even though an agreement has apparently been reached? Is that something the Department can take away and raise with Banking and Payments Federation Ireland? It is causing enormous frustration and a fair amount of risk for people who now do not know whether they should proceed with the works and draw down the refurbishment grant and whether that will jeopardise the mortgage drawdown at a later stage.