Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Over the course of Rebuilding Ireland, the Government is committed to meeting the housing needs of more than 138,000 households. This will be achieved through blended delivery, with over 50,000 homes being delivered through build, acquisition and leasing programmes, and some 88,000 further households being supported through the housing assistance payment, the rental accommodation scheme, RAS, and other schemes. A social house building programme is already well under way, with local authorities and approved housing bodies significantly expanding new build output year on year. We have seen increases of seven or eight times in activity over the past 12 to 18 months. It is important that we are back building houses and we are committed to that as a Government and under Project 2040, which allocated the funds to increase the social housing stock to 12,000 units annually until 2028.

At the end of 2018, the housing needs of some 90,500 households were being supported under current-funded programmes. If all the funding provided for these 90,500 households had been transferred to capital expenditure, to support building or buying homes, it would only have delivered approximately 5,500 homes, leaving no resources available to support the other 85,000 households. Looking at it another way, it would take almost €20 billion to provide a new-build local authority home for the 90,500 households supported under current-funded programmes at the end of 2018.

Rebuilding Ireland is working well, with annual delivery targets consistently exceeded. This has been achieved through a blended approach to delivery, the mix of which is evolving year on year, such that in 2021, the final year of Rebuilding Ireland, more households will be supported through build, acquisition and leasing programmes than through HAP and RAS.

I am confident that the actions, targets and resources available under Rebuilding Ireland provide a strong platform for the continued delivery of high quality, value-for-money social housing supports for those on social housing waiting lists.

As all Members know, if it was possible to build houses immediately and deliver them straight away that would be best, but one cannot. People need homes today. When we started Rebuilding Ireland some years ago and focused resources to build new housing, we also had to find homes there and then. There is a combination of current and capital spending and that blend will change in coming years and rightly so. This Fine Gael-led Government is committed to building social housing.

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