Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

One of the complications we have to acknowledge with CPO is that it involves some 70 pieces of legislation, some of which have their roots in the nineteenth century. The Law Reform Commission is undertaking a piece of work to see how we can reform and streamline CPO powers so they can be clearer. We have held workshops in the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government in the Customs House as part of our housing summits. We have taken exemplary local authorities in this area, such as Louth County Council, and talked through the different things they have done regarding CPO and how successful those approaches have been.

The repair and lease scheme is a good and necessary one. Often with local authorities, however, it proved to be the case that when they have engaged with someone on the repair and lease scheme that the home has come under the buy and renew scheme. The owners have not gone for a lease. Instead, they have sold the property to the council and the council has subsequently renewed the property. In those cases, under the repair and lease and buy and renew schemes together, we have achieved a return of more than 500 properties. That has proven, therefore, to be a successful approach.

A pilot study was also conducted across a number of local authorities. That was initially based on the CSO numbers for potential vacancies in the country. That was a high number, but it included homes for resale, reletting and holiday homes. We asked six local authorities to do a field study. Each was to investigate about 1,200 vacant homes within their local authority area. To date, those six local authorities have inspected more than 7,000 homes. Of the 7,157 homes which had been seen to be vacant, only 205 proved actually to be vacant on the second inspection, which I think happened some six months later. That brings us down to a truer level of vacancy of about 2.9%, which is a normal vacancy rate in a normally-functioning housing sector. I will return to the other points in my follow-on answer.

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