Mr. John Brannigan:

We certainly do not want to have a vacancy rate of 7.19%. It currently stands at 5.8% so we are working in a positive way. We want to get that figure down to a maximum of 3% and to go below that in time. I mentioned earlier that many of our vacancies arose from the council facilitating transfers for people from one local authority property to another.

Since we have introduced the tenure transfer policy, it has certainly reduced the number of vacant properties. When a property becomes vacant we carry out significant refurbishment work. We are looking at the level of work that is completed. On some of the properties that have become vacant over recent years we have completed the energy retrofit programme. It was easier to do it when the property was vacant. Then we had a lack of contractor availability. We have increased that pool from four contractors to seven now, so we hope we can get more work out there and speedier re-letting of the properties.