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

I want to raise a couple issues from the Housing Commission's report. There is a lot of depth to the report, but the most significant aspect of it is the issue of the housing deficit. When one reads the chapter it is not about the size of the deficit. The Minister will know the commission talks of a deficit of somewhere between 212,000 and 256,000 homes. The commission is very critical of the methodology that was given to the ESRI to produce the original study that underpinned the targets in the Minister's housing plan. This has been debated before, but it is very interesting it is confirmed in black and white in the Housing Commission's report. That very good piece of ESRI work only looked at new household formation from within the existing population and inward migration to work out what the new housing need would be year on year. The ESRI was not allowed look at unmet demand, pent-up demand or what the Housing Commission called "the deficit". Obviously the ESRI has been working since the end of last year on an updated study from its 2019-20 study. My understanding is the methodology for that was to be the same as the previous one. When the Minister of State, Deputy O'Donnell, was in front of the committee discussing the HNDA, I asked him if there was going to be an allowance by the Department to change the methodology informing the ESRI report to include unmet demand. Then it would not just deal with new household formation and inward migration, but also the deficit. This is no criticism of the ESRI because it is ultimately the Department that sets the parameters and pays for the research, but if it does not include unmet demand it is not going to the be able to capture what the Housing Commission has captured, namely, the demand existing within the system. My first question is therefore whether the methodology underpinning the ESRI report is the same as in 2019 or has the Minister changed it to include unmet demand.

The second question relates to the other really significant recommendation the commission has highlighted. This is the idea that there needs to be "a targeted increase in the proportion of social and cost-rental housing to 20% of the national stock". Social housing is currently just around 10% and cost rental has been very marginal so does not really impact on the overall stock. To move to a situation where 20% of the stock would be social and cost rental, we would probably have to double the output, on current figures. If we were to move, along the trajectory of the commission’s report, up to 70,000 homes at that peak of the deficit, much more than that would be needed. In addition to confirming whether the methodology of the ESRI report has been changed, is the Minister also seriously considering the scale of increase in social and affordable homes the commission is recommending? That would mean when he publishes his revised figures in the autumn it will not just be about the quantum, but also about the distribution within the tenures.