Emer Higgins (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael)
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I thank the Chairman. I thank all our guests and their teams, not just for attending and talking us through this but for all the work they do to deliver homes and get people into them, which we all support.

My number one concern in this area, which previous speakers also raised, is the delivery of targets and the ability to hit them. When the targets for Housing for All were set last year they were seen as ambitious by those of us in Government at any rate. We are operating in the context of the changing landscape with Brexit and everything that occurred last year, the supply chain backlogs and logjams we have seen as a result of Covid, rising inflation and its impact on the price of construction, the skills and labour shortage in the construction industry and the impact of the war in Ukraine, which is twofold in that it has a global impact but also a local impact with refugees already arriving here seeking homes. In the context of all those new global and domestic challenges the Housing for All targets are even more ambitious.

Mr. O'Connor, Mr. Curran and Ms Loftus have outlined how they expect to deliver them from a pipeline and an action plan perspective. My fear is whether they are achievable. The housing delivery action plans are being finalised by local authorities up and down the country. I am wondering if Mr. Curran has any insight into whether they will contain the figures and targets we expect or whether there may be surprises in store. If the plans propose to achieve what we expect in the context of the rolled-up Housing for All figure, are those targets achievable? Are we going to see from local authorities how they will be achieved? I appreciate there are strong pipelines in place to deliver those figures, as Mr. Curran detailed. I am concerned that even having people on site does not necessarily always translate into deliverables on time or on budget. Mr. Curran said there were 11,000 housing units under construction but I know of a couple of sites in my local authority where tools have been downed on social housing sites as a result of budgets and increasing costs. There are also other challenges from the builders' perspective but also from the perspective of the local authority, which has negotiated, set tenders and gone through the entire process. I want to try to get a handle on what can be done, what is achievable and what, if anything, Government can do to ensure this can be achieved. We had the HFA in with us last week and one of the questions I asked its representatives was whether local authorities had the ability to go back and ask for additional funding if prices were increasing on sites. The answer was "Yes". It was almost a no-questions-asked scenario where they would be getting at least 10% in that situation. What else can we do to make this work because we all need to make it work?

From a skills shortage perspective, is there anything the Government can do there? The Minster for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Deputy Harris, is doing a lot on the apprenticeship side. What else can we do? I think 27,000 is the figure for additional construction workers needed to fulfil Housing for All. On top of that, we have the retrofitting plan coming down the tracks and people will be subsumed into that as well. I am looking for our guests to use their expertise to indicate to us what we can do to help ensure those targets are achieved and entice more people into the industry from a skills perspective.