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

I thank the Deputy. First of all, we have the Housing Commission report and I thank its members for that. They have given a view and have obviously put significant work into the report. We will take their projections as well, because there was unmet demand, unquestionably. I said that from the day I took over as Minister we were dealing with ten very significant years of undersupply, so there is a pent-up demand that is there. It is previously unmet demand that needs to be met. As for the ESRI work, it has been asked to look at unmet demand. We are not just going to take the ESRI report. The methodology is important, certainly. With the commission's report and the ESRI report, the Government will decide what the revised targets will be. We will do that in the autumn, as I have said, and they will run to 2030.

The recommendation of 20% of national stock was discussed as well. I am aware the commission's recommendation is that 20% of the overall housing stock, as it is now, should be social and affordable. We will move towards that. We have changed Part V provision. That is for new developments. That was a significant step because it changes it going forward to the 20% provision in new developments between social and affordable. Let us look at housing output last year. If we park the unmet demand for a moment, there were 8,100-plus new-build social homes last year, out of a total housing delivery of about 33,000. Add the affordable and cost rental homes on top and we are well above 20%. That is just in one year. The previous year we would have been the same, but we have to catch up. To answer the Deputy's question directly, in the revised housing target we set going forward to the end of 2030 we will be looking across tenure at provision of what we need for affordable and for social. We have not constrained the ESRI in the work it is doing. The Deputy mentioned that yesterday in the Dáil. When we get the detail, we have obviously got the CSO detail which the ESRI has gone through. We will go through the Housing Commission detail as well. We will sit down in a very structured and informed way then and set forward the revised targets, which will be published in the autumn.