Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I respectfully suggest the Deputy is missing the point, not me. Money is not the obstacle to delivering social housing. Local authorities which have good projects on their books are getting the funding they need to progress them. The challenge is capacity and to deliver the scale of social housing we want in time and to meet demand. We have had an enormous increase in housing budgets to deliver on that social housing need. We also want to get on top of that. To complement what we are doing, we want private sector investment, as well as the private sector delivering social housing solutions under long-term leasing arrangements. This means we can get people out of private sector rental accommodation, where they do not have the security of tenure they may be looking for, into long-term leasing arrangements for ten or 20 years, where they will get the kind of security of tenure for which they are looking.

There is a role for the private sector in adding to the number of social housing solutions being delivered.

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