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

I propose to take Questions Nos. 43 and 85 together.

Earlier this year, I published the 2019 targets for social housing delivery on a local authority basis and by delivery mechanism, including build, acquisition, leasing, housing assistance payment, HAP, and rental accommodation scheme, RAS. Each quarter, I publish details of progress against those targets and the outputs for the third quarter of 2019 have just been published. These show 66% delivery to the end of September, or just under 18,000 households securing keys to a home under a social housing programme in the first nine months of this year.

All stakeholders recognise the critical need to continue to increase social housing supply through build activity. When Rebuilding Ireland was published in 2016, the construction activity base and pipeline in place were so low that the action plan's build targets had to be weighted towards the latter years of the six-year programme, recognising the time lag between project conception and delivery. In 2016 and 2017, therefore, the focus was on maximising delivery by returning vacant stock to active use and by supporting the completion of vacant homes, while, in parallel, a major programme was put in place to expand the build pipeline significantly. This year, we continue to see the fruits of the expansion of the social housing construction programme. The build target for 2019 is to deliver 6,545 homes, an increase of more than 30% on last year's target. Along with teams from my Department, I have been meeting local authorities regularly to ensure every effort continues to be made to achieve this target and I am confident we are on track to deliver close to the full target.

The social housing construction status report, which is published on a quarterly basis on the Rebuilding Ireland website, provides detailed information on build activity in each local authority, including the number of homes on-site and actively being delivered. In addition to the homes being built this year, more than 3,400 additional social homes are to be delivered through acquisition and leasing schemes. In total, we are committed to ensuring more than 27,000 households are supported across all of the social housing programmes this year, bringing to 100,000 the number of households that will have been supported since 2016. Next year, in excess of 11,000 social housing homes will be delivered through build, acquisition and leasing programmes. This includes more than 7,500 newly built social housing homes, which will be 11 times the level in 2016, the first year of Rebuilding Ireland, and will be the highest number of such homes to be built this century. My Department and I will continue to work proactively with local authorities and AHBs to ensure this and other targets continue to be met.

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