Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael)
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The Minister of State, Deputy English, is within my Department and we spoke before he appeared in front of the committee. I am fully aware of what his intentions are, he has my full support and there is no question on that.

We will follow up on getting correspondence to the committee and I apologise for that omission.

It is interesting to consider the tables in more detail. The programme for Rebuilding Ireland recognised that local authorities would be slower off the mark because they did not have the capacity. I mentioned in my opening statement that more than 700 new posts have been sanctioned, which means there are now more than 3,000 local authority staff working in this area. The profile for delivery gets better for local authorities towards the end of Rebuilding Ireland. One of the tables shows that when the composition of the builds is broken down, local authorities will deliver the majority of them. We will not see the 2:1 ratio this year but it will not be far from that. By the end of Rebuilding Ireland, what local authorities will have done will be impressive. Things do not stop with Rebuilding Ireland and there is not a cliff edge at the end of 2021. At that point, all local authorities will have the afterburners going on housing delivery. The housing delivery office will at that stage have spent two years with local authorities, have new guidance confirmed for the external layout for social housing and have the internal specifications. New protocols will have been agreed on procurement and much more will happen in respect of certain local authorities implementing clustering initiatives in which they have expertise. There will be an impressive pipeline under the national development plan. I want to make sure that housing building and delivery are hardwired into local authorities so that if someone was to come in after me and try and unpick that in any way, they would find it impossible. That is what we need to make sure we do so we do not repeat mistakes that were made in the past.

I will turn to families in emergency accommodation. We still have an issue whereby we are getting better data in Dublin than in the regions, although there is much greater proportion of families in emergency accommodation than in the regions. For those in Dublin, the majority of families have been in emergency accommodation for 12 months or less. Approximately 187 families have been in emergency accommodation for between 12 and 18 months, 146 families have been in emergency accommodation between 18 and 24 months and 186 families have been in emergency accommodation for two years or more.

The Deputy is correct that it is more difficult to house larger families. I said in response to Senator Murnane O'Connor that a number of families who are now in emergency accommodation, and particularly those who have been there for two years or longer, have complex backgrounds that meant the families ended up in emergency accommodation and have been unable to get out. In some cases, they have particular and fundamental needs that are not just about meeting the rent. Those people require much more dedicated support to ensure that, as they move out of emergency accommodation and into a home, they will stay in that home.

There was talk about getting families out of emergency accommodation when Deputy Coveney was the relevant Minister and the intention was not to get all families out of emergency accommodation within a year because he recognised at the time that some families had much more complex needs that would take more time to be resolved. That continues to be the case, particular for families who have been in emergency accommodation for longer than 24 months. As I said earlier, the majority of families have been in emergency accommodation for less than 12 months and those figures are always improving, but particularly so in the past year because of the additional houses that we have available to us through delivery across the different streams.