James Browne (Wexford, Fianna Fail)

There are no proposals at the moment, but we are looking at this with local authorities. Ultimately, local authorities need to ensure that they have sufficient budgets to manage their voids, as they are often known, and vacant social homes and that they can turn them around as quickly as possible. The discrepancy, if you like, between local authorities is quite extraordinary in the context of how quickly some consistently turn their vacant homes around in comparison with others and of the amount of money being spent. I do not have the data in front of me, but we published a table on this only about six weeks ago. I will be happy to get that for the Cathaoirleach. The table shows that there is a significant discrepancy. If two, three or four local authorities can turn their properties around quite quickly and at a lower cost, all local authorities should be able to do so.

The local authorities that are successfully turning their vacant social homes around quickly are those that have strong and robust planned maintenance programmes. They are keeping an eye on their social homes regularly and fixing problems as they happen, as opposed to some local authorities that do not have planned maintenance programmes whereby it is only when a person hands back a property that the local authority starts to inspect it and sees that there are significant problems with that property. Some local authorities try to do significant retrofitting when they get properties back, but, again, that should be done on a planned basis rather than in an ad hoc manner when a property is handed back.

In terms of the time it takes, some of that relates to refurbishing works but some of it is just a process. Some local authorities are just very slow about working their way through offers. Some applicants might have a legitimate reason for turning down offers, but the process of offering a property to a second person seems to be quite cumbersome in some local authorities. Other local authorities will, for example, identify maybe five people for one house. If the first person does not take it, the local authority will quickly offer it to the second person rather than having it go back into its system. Local authorities also have choice-based letting systems that work quite well. It comes down to planned maintenance and speedy systems. They make a huge difference.