Ms Laura Behan:

First of all, I am sorry if I gave the impression that we are really only intending to target 1,500 affordable housing supports every year. In fact, it is 15,000. The starter homes commitment that is outlined in the programme for Government is the Government's targeted level of intervention to support affordable housing and the cohort of people the Senator is talking about who are challenged to meet their housing needs in the private market affordably. We have done a lot of work with the ESRI to gain an insight into the level of need with affordability constraints that are arising in terms of new households that are being formed in Ireland every year. I outlined a little bit about it earlier. It is the housing need and demand assessment. It is built up at local authority level.

It starts with all 31 local authorities in the State. It looks at the various income deciles. It looks at social housing eligibility, the number of new houses that will be needed and the number of new households that will be formed over the coming five years at any point in time. Using that information, it makes an assessment of what the level of need with affordability constraint will be - the people who will not be able to rent or buy in the private market. As I said, the Housing for All plan in 2021 was based on a need, which was assessed at that time, of about 4,000 households per year. We expect that when the next housing need and demand assessment will be competed, that need will be higher but we are calibrating our response to be higher to match that.