Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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4. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government the number of council houses owned and managed by local authorities that will be delivered in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 under the Rebuilding Ireland plan; if he will provide a breakdown of these figures by local authority; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [35506/16]

Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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For some time I have been trying to get to the bottom of actual council houses and the delivery of same under Rebuilding Ireland. I would like to be wrong and I hope I am wrong but I suspect that under the heading "social housing" or "new build" we are actually getting hardly any local authority housing. Will the Minister provide the factual situation on local authority housing?

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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The 47,000 social housing units to be delivered under Rebuilding Ireland - Action Plan for Housing and Homelessness, span the years 2016 to 2021. All of these 47,000 units will be available for local authorities to utilise in addressing housing need for those on waiting lists. Of the overall total,up to 33,650 will be owned and available to be managed by local authorities. Of these 33,650 units, approximately 18,700 will be delivered through construction, PPPs, voids, regeneration, rapid build and Part V acquisitions by local authorities. Some 2,300 will be acquired from the market by local authorities and 3,500 will become available to local authorities through the new repair and leasing scheme. There will be 9,150 units leased from a range of sources, including private owners and the NTMA special purpose vehicle, which is to be established. These units will be secured using robust long-term lease arrangements for periods of ten to 20 years. In the case of such units, local authorities may directly manage them or may arrange for them to be managed by approved housing bodies. The balance of 13,350 units within the overall 47,000 target will be constructed or purchased and managed by approved housing bodies. These are all new houses coming into the system.

A breakdown of the 33,650 overall local authority delivery, which I referred to earlier, is not available on an individual local authority basis at this point. However, the following table sets out the annual national breakdown envisaged. While all local authority areas have targets out to 2017, details of which are on my Department’s website, and are being supported by my Department to accelerate and increase social housing delivery, new individual targets that reflect the increased ambition and funding provided under Rebuilding Ireland will formally issue to each local authority in January 2017, following the completion of the summary of social housing assessments in 2016. The assessment process is now well advanced and will provide updated figures for social housing need. This will allow for social housing delivery and resources to be aligned with the up-to-date, priority housing needs locally.

Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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The expression, "The devil is in the detail", takes on a whole new meaning when it comes to trying to get to the bottom of figures for social housing in the Minister's Rebuilding Ireland plan.

I will study the Minister's answer in detail, because there was a lot of detail. Certainly, on first hearing, one could be forgiven for saying I am not really getting a straight answer as to how many of the 47,000 houses will actually be - let me be very clear - new local authority houses, not ones acquired under Part V leasing arrangements, not approved housing bodies-----

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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Part V is not leasing.

Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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This is the detail I am trying to get at. I will be asking about Cherrywood later. We are going to have 8,000 houses. How many of them will be council houses? My fear is it will be very few. I know that, next year, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown will get 103 local authority houses, although, in fact, we do not even know if they are all local authority houses. It is probably fewer than 100 council houses whereas we have 6,000 people on the list. This is the detail I want at national level and then broken down county by county.

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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With regard to Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, while I was in talking about how we can deliver more social houses, Deputy Boyd Barrett was outside protesting.

Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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I was. I am not a councillor.

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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As opposed to making a contribution to the solution, he was just screaming and shouting, as usual.

The issue for Dún Laoghaire or for anywhere else is that its local authority decides how many social houses it wants to deliver and then we will pay for them. We want to work with local authorities to ramp up social housing delivery dramatically. I made that very clear when I was in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown. My understanding, according to a figure I got the other day, is that an extra 222 will be delivered by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown by January 2018, which is in just over one year. We can go through the detail of that if we get the detail from the local authority.

My only objective is to increase significantly the number of social houses owned, built, acquired or altered to make them suitable for good quality social housing, preferably in mixed tenure estates. We will encourage that and spend a lot of money to deliver it. That is why we are talking about these kinds of figures, with 18,700 to be delivered through construction, PPPs, voids, regeneration, rapid build and Part V acquisitions. Part V is not leasing; it is acquisitions. There are other leasing projects we can do that make sense, for example, leasing for between ten and 20 years to give people certainty and security of tenure. Although the Deputy might not like to hear it because it does not suit the political arguments, the Government is committed to delivering tens of thousands of extra social houses over the next five years.

Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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The reason I was protesting is that, for six years, since I was elected to this House, I have been pleading with the Government to return to the provision of local authority housing. For five of those years, I got blanked completely, and the list in Dún Laoghaire went from about 3,000 to about 6,000, with people now waiting 18 years on the list. I have people coming in to me every week with their kids, literally crying about having no place to live. That is why I am protesting. If the Minister can solve the problem, I will be a very happy person. It is not out of a desire to have an unnecessary political argument. I just want a solution for the desperate people who are coming in every week.

What I cannot get, and I hardly have time to ask the question, is the information on how many of these will be local authority housing, as opposed to housing from the approved housing bodies or leases. Let me put it this way. Of the 8,000 houses, let us say I can convince the council that 2,000 of those should be council houses, will the Minister give Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown the money to take 2,000 of the 8,000 houses in Cherrywood into public ownership as local authority houses?

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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The point I was making about protesting is that we were out there to discuss how we ramp up and significantly increase social and affordable housing provision in Dún Laoghaire, which has specific problems because of the extraordinarily high average rents and house prices there. We need to tailor solutions, as I made clear to some of the councillors who are connected to Deputy Boyd Barrett's grouping. I recognise there are almost unique problems there that require solutions which my Department has to be part of. That is what we are there for.

If the Deputy looks at what we are trying to do, he will see we are increasing the housing budget for next year by 50% in one year. No other Department is even coming close in terms of the pace of increased budgetary commitment. That is because, primarily, that money will be going into social housing provision in Dún Laoghaire and elsewhere. We need ambitious approaches to come from local authorities and we want to work in partnership with them to make that happen. That is what we are trying to do. There is no mystery about it and no one is trying to hide anything.

The figure I believe the Deputy is looking for is that 33,650 of the 47,000 will be owned and available to be managed by local authorities. The other 13,000 or so will be through AHBs because we need to get the balance between the two to maximise output.