Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

The rolling total is over a 12-month period so we have to wait until we get through the last quarter. It will not be until the first quarter of next year that we will be able to confirm whether we reached 25,000, but I believe we are there or thereabouts. We are talking about building houses and it is not an exact science in terms of being able to say we will get to 25,000 on the dot, 25,001, or whatever it might be, but all the percentage increases we are seeing point to us reaching it. We keep it under review and we do that by looking at commencement notices, planning permissions, completion notices and things like sentiment, although sometimes it is difficult to capture sentiment and to know exactly what it will mean for delivery.

Rebuilding Ireland contains different targets, but the main target is 125,000 new places to live by the end of 2021. We still have to get through 2020 and 2021, but already we have delivered 64,000 new places to live since the third quarter of 2016, while there are 26,000 on site over the past 12 months and there are more than 30,000 with planning permission. We can be certain we are going to hit that target from two years beforehand, unless there is some type of massive shock to the economy that is not foreseen at present. Even if there were and if we look at worst-case scenarios, the funding we are providing is based on an average of 2% growth over the remaining two years, and all indicators at present show that growth will be higher than that. Even if there was a shock, the funding would be in place to support that delivery of social housing.

I believe it will continue on the private side as well, given the kind of demand that is there.

Families should go into homes. No one is saying anything different to that. Until we have enough homes built, however, we must have emergency measures in place which are suitable. We brought out the hub programme because we recognised hotels were not suitable. We needed to get families into hubs and that work continues. We are constantly adding new hubs. Two new hubs have been opened in my constituency in the past few months. There is a pipeline for around 400 new hub spaces.

The difficulty is that, sometimes, local authorities bring forward a plan for a hub but it will fall for different reasons. Maybe the local authority is in negotiations with somebody who owns the land or the site. Maybe the negotiations do not conclude in the local authority's favour. It has been the case that in my engagements with local authorities over the past two and a half years they might have thought they had four hubs coming but only two materialise. That is why we ask them to always have a contingency in place should something fail.