Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 19 January 2023

Public Accounts Committee

Financial Statements 2020: Housing Agency
Financial Statements 2021: Approved Housing Bodies Regulatory Authority
Chapter 7: Housing Agency Revolving Acquisition Fund
Section 2 Report – Unauthorised Release of Funds from the Central Fund of the Exchequer

9:30 am

Mr. Jim Baneham:

I will go into that. To go back a little bit, I was very active on delivering the fund at the time. The banks made lists of properties available to us. They sent substantial lists, which we then disseminated. We would split them up per local authority, and engage with each local authority. In some cases the details on the lists, in terms of identifying the property, was not sufficiently good for them to know exactly what property it was or the properties were unsuitable. Not to make it sound overly easy for the local authorities, they had some work to do. They had to look at issues, say, over saturation for social housing for some of them, etc. Effectively, there was a fairly significant drop-off between the lists. For example, if we sent a list of 50 properties to a local authority, the likelihood was that it would come back with an interest in 25.