Darragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

We have been specifically discussing cost rental but there has also been a significant expansion in the first home scheme for first-time buyers. As I referred to earlier, one in two new-built homes bought last year was bought by a first-time buyer. Between help-to-buy and shared equity, the average equity we are providing is between €69,000 to €100,000 to first-time buyers and to households to buy their homes. At the end of the first quarter we had just short of 1,400 approvals under that scheme. We have more approvals in the first three months of this year than we had since the inception of the scheme last July. I expect that the further changes I will make on cost-rental viability will unlock quite a significant portion of additional developments where planning permission has already been granted and they have not yet been able to start.

Development funding is constrained at the moment, rates are high, so measures like this are required to be able to make these schemes viable.

Cost rental has been very popular. We have seen most of our schemes more than ten times oversubscribed with long-term, secure, State-backed rents with minimum tenures of 50 years and we are absolutely determined to roll this out further this year.

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