Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputies for their contributions. Deputy O'Sullivan raise the process of buying a house. Approximately 60,000 people a year are buying houses. It is great to see that happen. For a lot of people who I know and who bought a house in the past couple of years, some found the process seamless and others found it really complex and stressful, particularly if they were involved in bidding wars or were victims of gazumping. In some cases, they found homes that were put on the market but should not have been put on the market at all for various reasons such as legal reasons around probate. The idea is to establish a review group to look at those issues and to look at best practice in other countries and recommend some changes that could be made. The group is currently being convened. It will comprise members from Departments, legal professionals, auctioneers, estate agents and, crucially, consumer representatives and other stakeholders. Having reviewed the current conveyancing and probate process and identified scope for greater efficiency and streamlining, the group will report its recommendations to the Housing for All Secretaries General delivery group. Hopefully, that will be done in the next few months.

Deputy Murnane-O'Connor from Carlow raised issues and delays for people having to wait to get on the housing list. I agree that people should not have to wait long, maybe just a few weeks from the time they make the application to a decision. I will definitely raise that and bring it to the attention of the Minister, Deputy O'Brien and Minister of State, Deputy O'Donnell. It might be the case that more staffing is required in Carlow County Council. The Deputy also mentioned the high refusal rate for local authority home loans. Sometimes there is a reason for that. It must be borne in mind that if somebody applies for a local authority home loan, they have already been refused by a bank or maybe even two banks. That is often because they are not able to pay the money back. It is not a good thing to give people a loan they cannot afford to pay back. That does not do them any favours in the medium term either. That might be the reason but I am only speculating there.

Deputy Boyd Barrett raised Jennifer Bray's analysis in The Irish Times, which I thought was reasonably fair. I would not agree with it all but I thought it was reasonably fair and not as negative as the Deputy put across. It acknowledged good progress on overall home building, first-time buyers and social housing, but pointed out that we are falling behind targets on affordable purchase schemes. We know that and accept it. It is an area we are going to need to focus more on. That does not mean less focus on social housing or homes to buy in the normal way but it means a bit more focus on that, particularly by the LDA, which will lead on a lot of those projects.

There are many different forms of public housing. There is cost-rental, social housing, council housing, housing built by approved housing bodies, housing built by the LDA and the tenantin situscheme. It can be built and it can be bought. There are too many people trying to drill down into statistics to diminish what has been achieved by not looking at social housing or public housing in the round, taking one aspect of it which might be direct build by councils and saying that is the only social housing being built. That is deeply misleading and it is not the reality on the ground. I have the pleasure to meet people from time to time when they have moved into new social housing projects. They are delighted to be there and to have a secure tenancy and affordable rent. They never raise with me whether it was the LDA that built it or an approved housing body. There is an academic interest in that, which is not reflected on the ground with real people in the way it is in the media.

Deputy Boyd Barrett mentioned people in emergency accommodation for more than a year or two years in some cases. Roughly a third to half of people who require emergency accommodation from the State are out of it within six months and most within a year. I agree it would be useful to have a better analysis and better understanding as to why people are in emergency accommodation for more than a year or two. There may be complex reasons. Having dealt with some of those cases, I know what some of the reasons are but I do not have a document that gives me a breakdown as to what the reasons are. That would be useful and I have discussed it with the Minister, Deputy O'Brien.

On retrofit, we are ramping up to 30,000 or 35,000 retrofits this year, which is pretty good going. Every year, we are building or retrofitting approximately 60,000 new homes. We can improve that further. Finally, Deputy Ó Murchú asked a question about modern methods of construction. We are using them. OPW does and Fingal County Council does in my own constituency. We have the construction technology centre in Galway and a demonstration park in Mount Lucas. "Modern methods of construction" is a very broad term. It ranges from factory-built homes that last for 30 to 50 years to whole slabs of concrete being brought in. It is a term that people use correctly and it is a better term than modular, but it mean lots of different things. It works in some places and not others. We are using it already and are going to use it more in the years ahead.

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