Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael)
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I thank the Deputy for his questions. An important policy change on acquisitions was announced at the first housing summit in September. I did not believe that local authorities should compete in high-demand areas with young couples and people trying to buy homes because it was pushing up the prices of houses and was not contributing to our stock of social housing. As a result we made a policy decision to move a significant amount of that funding towards direct build by local authorities and housing bodies. That meant that there would be a 30% increase this year in the number of units directly built by local authorities, which amounts to a figure of around 800 new homes. I did not cease the practice of acquisitions completely, because in certain parts of the country that are not high-demand local authorities can get considerable value for money by buying those properties from the market. It is quicker and cheaper to do. In places such as Donegal and Roscommon local authorities are continuing to acquire homes. For this year we are looking at a total of 7,900 new social housing homes, through builds, acquisitions and leasing agreements. Some 900 of those will be acquired, but a significant amount more than that will be directly built. The policy changed, but it did not change for low-demand areas where acquisitions make sense. That is a judgement call for the local authority.

On the build breakdown for 2018, the figure that we have for local authorities and housing bodies is roughly around 3,800. That breaks down into 2,300 from the local authorities side and 1,500 from the approved housing bodies in terms of direct builds.

Approximately 600 come into the build figure under Part V. In addition, we have the 900 acquisitions to which we referred and the leasing agreements add another 2,000. That is the 7,900 figure broken down by the different build types and Part Vs. I did not mention the voids, which number 560.

The enhanced leasing agreement is a new delivery stream we have been signalling, which is now almost coming to completion thanks to the good work of the Minister of State, Deputy English, and his officials in getting it ready to go out to an expression of interest and finalising those agreements once we get into April. We are also progressing, with the European Investment Bank, EIB, the potential for a new stream of delivery for affordable housing. That is ongoing. I was in Luxembourg last month and we are having detailed discussions on a weekly basis with officials from the EIB to see if we can start to have more affordable housing at a greater scale. This is line with the announcements I made in January, particularly the cost-rental side of those announcements.

With regard to homelessness, the Deputy is absolutely right to say the problem is escalating in certain ways when one looks at the numbers. I know the Deputy recognises that a huge amount of work has been done. We recently saw with Storm Emma the dedication of officials in my Department, local authorities, the Dublin Region Homeless Executive and the NGO sector to help people who were on the frontline of this, people who were sleeping rough, to get them into secure accommodation. Our responsibility is now to get them into sustainable accommodation. We still have a very high number of families in hotels. We moved a significant number of families out of hotels last year but families continue to present. Until we have more family hubs built - we have a rapid hub programme under development - families will have to be looked after in hotels, recognising that it is not an adequate first response. We are moving quickly to a situation where there will be more than enough rapid hub spaces in place for families to be accommodated as a first response before we get them into more secure tenancies. On the number of exits, we are doing work at the moment which I had hoped to publish before now but I will try to publish it later today or tomorrow. It addresses the number of exits that were achieved last year as well as information on more recent homeless statistics. We will put them into the public domain as quickly as we can.