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

I wish to make two very small observations. It would not be possible to compel a local authority to impose a CPO in legislation. First, it is a reserve function of the executive because it is capital expenditure. More importantly, a local authority can only impose a CPO on a building for social housing with the approval of the Department and with the necessary funding. The capital funding a local authority has is determined by the Department and not by the local authority in accordance with targets that are "agreed" with the local authority but usually set by the Department centrally.

Where local authorities are minded to acquire refurbished buildings for social housing, they will make two complaints. First, they will say that it can often be very difficult to get sanction from the Department to purchase but also they get no upfront reassurance of refurbishment costs. I had a conversation with a housing manager outside Dublin. That local authority wanted to acquire and eventually, I think, did acquire a large town centre historic building that had real potential for multi-unit occupancy. Initially it opted not to buy it because there was no guarantee of being able to cover the refurbishment costs. Often it is only when the local authority buys the building and starts to do the detailed survey work that it knows what it will cost. In the end, given the significance of the building for the particular urban portion of the city, the manager decided to take a risk that it would eventually get agreement from the Department. However, chief executives are Accounting Officers and need to balance the books. Therefore, it would be very rare for such a risk to be taken.

There was the occupation of a building in North Frederick Street by Take Back the City. They argued that that building should have been subject to a CPO. The challenge for Dublin City Council at that stage was that the full cost of buying and refurbishing that building would probably have been about €1.5 million if not more and it would have resulted in five units of accommodation. Under its social housing plan, the local authority would have been able to deliver far greater numbers of units for that amount of money at that time. It did not make sense for the housing manager to impose a CPO on the building and only get five units when the local authority could get eight units through another procedure.

That then flips over to the Cathaoirleach's question about the Minister. Having a reporting mechanism to the Minister would have another advantage. Right now, if the Chair or I want the information, we have to go to each local authority and correlate it. Local authorities have different reporting mechanisms for different data. If we put in a parliamentary question to the Minister to ask for that information, he will say that is a matter for the local authorities. Allowing Deputies to be able to ask the Minister to provide the information would allow us to be able to ask the Minister what funding his Department is providing to those local authorities that want to apply CPOs. I know it is not the primary reason the Cathaoirleach is proposing that reporting mechanism, but the more I think about it, the more I think it would have a real material value. Far too often when we ask questions of the Minister, particularly about reserve functions of local authorities, he says it is nothing to do with him.

I am emphasising the point that I still think that section of the Bill should include reporting to the housing section of the local authority. I am increasingly convinced that a reporting function to the Minister would be very useful. We could then invite the Minister to appear before the committee, say local authorities have told him there are X thousand and ask what he is doing about it. The Minister might say that is a matter of applying CPOs locally but we could ask if he is providing refurbishment funding.

One of the best local authority social housing refurbishment projects I have seen is Ellis Court, Dublin 7, just off Benburb Street. If the Chairman has not gone to it, he should contact Tuath Housing and go and see it. It was one of the very first social housing projects by the old Dublin Corporation in the 19th century.

It is an old tenement-style four-storey Victorian red-brick building or complex. It had been very unpopular tenement social housing in the late 19th and early 20th century. Much of it had been vacant and in a very bad state of dereliction for some time. There was a homeless hostel in one part of it, and then it was derelict. That complex was refurbished. I cannot remember the number of social units that are now occupied, but let us imagine it is 20 to 30. It is in an urban location in some of the most expensive prime real estate. They kept the entire structure of the 19th century Victorian building, so all of the embodied carbon objectives are met. It has produced really exceptionally high-quality social homes, including ground-floor disability adapted units. That was done for €400,000 per unit of accommodation. If you demolished the building and built apartments, it would cost €500,000 per unit of accommodation. That does not include the demolition and embodied carbon costs.

When I talked to people in Tuath - and I had been out on site with the development manager at the time - while they spoke very highly of the heritage officer in Dublin City Council, the city architect, Ali Grehan, and the housing department, the number of hoops they had to jump through, particularly with the Department, to get the funding released to do what is an exceptional project took a huge amount of time. I am only giving that by way of example. It goes back to the point I made at the start in my own Bill. There is a really good AHB and really good council officials but the system militates against them. Yet despite all that, they were able to do it. If the Minister had all that information, just from a public scrutiny and pressure point of view, that would be a really valuable tool. I am saying to keep the Minister in but to consider adding the local authority housing department.