Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail)
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Members have raised a fundamental issue. There have been a couple of examples of Departments sending us information a month after the meeting which should perhaps have been included in the briefing material made available prior to the meeting. It was well flagged that we wanted to know the funding model for local authorities and local property tax, LPT, equalisation. That information should have been in the original briefing note such that we could have debated it rather than it being sent to us some time later. We have now been provided with the information.

A similar situation pertained at the meeting on public private partnerships, PPPs. The witnesses had no information at the time but we are now receiving reams of pages. How much of it is relevant is another point. However, everything that has been sent to us to date on PPPs should have been available to us prior to the meeting. We will come to that later on.

We have received a reply from the Minister for Finance, Deputy Donohoe, in respect of a report on our earlier committee report following our complaint that we were unhappy with the initial reply and would discuss it in detail. We have now been provided with a huge amount of information.

As Chairman of the committee, I propose that we request the secretariat to examine information received after a meeting to see if it could reasonably have been provided before the meeting. Issues will always emerge during the course of a meeting which could not have been foreseen. Perhaps members could flag potential issues of interest to the secretariat in advance. We might put in place a system to identify two or three topics which should be addressed in briefing material. We may do that in regard to our work programme. It is a point to which we must return.

As regards the document received from the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government, members have asked for further information on direct build. Deputy Catherine Murphy asked about ghost estates and wants more information about recoupable money and whether that has been recouped.

I wish to have a more extensive note on the mortgage arrears resolution process and information on how many houses have been repossessed by each local authority. Laois County Council has repossessed more houses in County Laois than banks have. Most were voluntary surrenders whereby the occupants handed in the key but they still had to go through a legal process to complete that. It is very widespread and involves people in social or affordable housing and various issues. We must have those figures for each local authority.

I also wish to have information on the mortgage protection insurance charge to local authority borrowers for each local authority. I have this week submitted a parliamentary question on that issue and have looked at it in the past. The charge is several times more expensive than similar insurance available from the private sector. I wish to have a full breakdown of the current arrangements in that regard and a comparison to the private sector offerings.

To follow on from Deputy Catherine Murphy's comment on ghost or unfinished estates, unfinished housing developments are dealt with on page 24. Members may find it instructive that at 9 a.m. yesterday morning, I went into my local authority because Laois fared particularly badly in a report on the number of housing units in unfinished estates issued last week by the Department. I went into my local authority to run through the report. This is not about Laois; it is a general comment. I told the director of services that it was the first time I had left a council building more confused than I was when I went in. My confusion was caused by the different definitions of what constitutes an unfinished housing estate.

Sometimes, several different descriptions are used. If an estate is half built and nobody has occupied a unit, and it is just fenced off, it is not included in the statistics because there is nobody in it. If unfinished houses are fenced off on an estate in which units are occupied, that is not considered an estate unfinished because remedial work has been done, to which the Deputy referred. Houses are almost complete on some estates but a number of local authorities take the view that they are only waiting to be sold and, therefore, the estates are finished, even though they are not. We need a clear definition and explanation regarding what an unfinished estate means. It means something different every time the question is asked. The committee wants a detailed note on this. There are myriad descriptions such as ghost estates, unfinished estates and incomplete estates which confuses the public.