Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

This relates to the comments I made earlier. I brought the matter up in the Dail and I would like to hear about this from the Minister. Obviously, the amendment tabled by Deputy Ó Broin and other members of Sinn Féin is on the basis that he is not satisfied that the information of the housing needs demand assessment referred to by the Minister has adequate detail and specificity to ensure the housing strategy that will be developed by a council will meet the housing demand of that local authority area.

I assume that is the logic of what he is saying. The Minister has responded, including in our earlier discussions on this, that the housing needs demand assessment process introduced in 2021 has addressed the problem. The Deputy's amendment implies that we need not only a general housing needs demand assessment but also a specific one, with as much detail as possible about the local area, and also that we need to ensure the housing strategy developed will meet the needs of the area, particularly the social and affordable housing needs. Is the Minister 100% confident that what he has in the legislation will achieve this end and that what Deputy Ó Broin has proposed is not necessary? The Deputy is correct to highlight this, for the reason I outlined earlier, namely that the Housing for All targets for Dún Laoghaire were inadequate. If we had developed social and affordable housing to deal with the fixed number on the existing list, the targets for our area under Housing for All would just about have met the need. The amount would have fallen short but it would have been getting there. If you had added in the likely number of new social housing applicants over the period from when the targets were set to the end of the period of applicability of Housing for All, incredibly there would have been more people on the housing list than there were when the targets were set, such is the level of demand. We worked that out. My point is that we have to get this right. If we set targets based on very general statistics, not on a pretty forensic assessment of how many people are likely to be added to the list, it will be an issue. When you note the way rents and house prices are going, certainly in my area, you see that an increasing number of people are unable to source anything on the private market. Another fluctuation that is not so good in this context is that people's income takes them over the social housing threshold, meaning they get knocked off the list.