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

I will go straight to Senator Murnane O'Connor's questions, which are the most important, according to her, and to the questions posed by Senator McFadden.

In terms of local authorities, the funding is there and the extra resources are in place. We have told the local authorities that if they want to hire more staff, they can bill them directly to the Department. We have also set up a new housing delivery unit headed up by the Minister of State, Deputy English, with new resources. We have made design and procurement expertise available to the local authorities. The target for this year is 3,800 units for local authority and housing body direct builds. That does not include the units provided by way of Part IV. We have published those numbers for local authorities to have accountability and transparency, so that we can see exactly what is meant to be delivered. Those are good, robust numbers in that we have consulted with each local authority. That target number of units can be delivered as long as our delivery unit continues to drive things at local authority level. Of course, the local authority councillors have a role to play in this as well. Every time I make a housing intervention that takes any kind of power away from the local authorities or local councillors, they complain so I have to try to find a balance between national interventions and powers, and what the local authorities can and should be doing themselves.

In the context of Senator McFadden's questions, we have spoken about the history of this problem. Reference was made to the 90% fall in levels of construction, the hundreds of thousands of people who plummeted into negative equity and the more than 3,000 ghost estates, many of which were still being bulldozed up to quite recently. It is not just a seven-year problem with which we are dealing. In the first few years of the recession, we had to deal with the problem of having houses in places where no one wanted to live. We had to stand down the affordability scheme because there was a 50% drop in house prices. We no longer needed an affordability scheme and many people were in massive negative equity. The first few years of Fine Gael-led government were actually about fixing the economy and trying to turn those things around. We actually turned them around more quickly than many believed we could, in terms of creating jobs and so forth. We have an increase in pressure on housing now because of a natural shortage of supply coupled with more people being back at work and more than 100,000 of our sons and daughters returning from abroad. They all need somewhere to live and that has placed extra pressure on the housing sector.

Local authorities can recruit staff and bill the Department directly, as I have already said. We have identified lands on which the local authorities can build. Local authorities can partner with construction companies in order to deliver more homes more quickly. They can do all of those things. We have to be careful about making broad statements that local authorities are not building or that there is no social housing being built. The truth is that they are building social housing but just need to do more and we know that. Rebuilding Ireland is working. Across almost every metric that we have, it is exceeding its targets. I made an announcement around that at the beginning of the year.

The repair and lease scheme has been reformed. There were some problems with the ten-year condition but that has now been reduced to five years. We have increased the amount of money that can be spent if a former bedsit is being put back into use. We have also allowed the costs to be spread over a number of units so that, for example, one unit might cost more than €30,000 to refurbish while another might cost less than €5,000, so it can be balanced out. We have made the scheme more attractive and there are hundreds of applications in the system at the moment for repair and leasing.

We are in discussions with the banks about their properties but I cannot say any more than that at the moment. Senator Grace O'Sullivan is right to point out that we are here again, talking about housing and that we will be doing so for some time to come. Rebuilding Ireland is a five-year programme. That does not mean that it is going to take us five years to solve all of our problems. It just means that we have put in place a five-year programme to try to do every piece of it, including building a mature rental sector and building more social housing units. There will be a 50,000 increase in the social housing stock over that programme but it is going to take some more time before the new homes commencing on site each month actually get built and tenanted. It will not take too long but more time is needed.

It will take the remainder of this year before people start to feel what is happening in our housing sector. That said, over the course of last year, 26,000 new social housing tenancies were created between the private rental market and our own builds. We will do something similar again this year, if not more. It is not that people have to wait too long. We have the supports in place through HAP and through our own build programme to help them in the meantime. The Senator is right to focus on affordability. We are still 20% off the house prices peak of the boom years when it comes to buying a house. However, when it comes to renting, we are well above the boom time peak because of the shortage of supply. Affordability is a key issue that we must address.

The Goodbody report is very interesting. It looks at the number of BER certificates issued but that does include self-builds. If one looks at Goodbody's figures for the first three months of this year, they show a 45% increase, excluding self-builds. The report says that we are one third off what is needed. Given what actually happened in our housing and construction sectors and in our economy, to be back at one third off is not so bad. Our own statistics, based on data from the Central Bank, on ESB connections, commencement notices and planning permissions all point to us being one third away from where we need to be in order to be in a steady state.

The ESB figure is no longer being used for completions because that figure is for newly-built homes or any homes that have been vacant for more than two years. It is interesting that if the figure is 18,000 to 20,000 based on ESB connections, people say that is not accurate because it includes vacancies but at the same time, they say we are not doing anything about vacancy rates. If the ESB connection figure is 18,000, then that could be 10,000 new builds and 8,000 units taken out of vacancy, which is fantastic because it signifies better management of our housing stock. It could also mean 18,000 new builds and no vacancies. We cannot be criticised on both. What it means for people moving into those houses is a new home that was not previously there, either because it was newly built or was vacant for more than two years and that must be welcomed.

I absolutely agree that the State needs to intervene to prevent land speculation. A vacant site levy of 3% is in place at the moment and that will more than double to 7% next year. That means that if landowners have not built on their land by the end of 2019, they will pay a 10% levy on their land but we will do more than that. Senator Buttimer raised this issue too and we are going to intervene directly in the land market by building on public and semi-State lands. We expect that to have a dramatic impact on the price of land in this country.

Reference was made to 10,000 people marching on the streets recently in a homelessness protest. I get accused of inflating my figures sometimes but the figure we have for that protest is around 4,000. That said, nobody should have to march. I welcome people expressing their democratic right to protest and getting angry and frustrated about the issue. The Government is also getting angry and frustrated, which is why we are doing so much about it. We need to be careful about the numbers of people that were actually at that protest. We also need to understand some peoples' motivations because there are some people who do not want to hear the good news. They do not want to acknowledge that social housing is increasing so they point to other metrics and say that the levels are falling or that Rebuilding Ireland is failing because there is an increase in homelessness.

There is an increase in homelessness but a big part of that is the fact that not enough homes are being built. However, as we build more homes, we will be able to help those people. Crucially, 4,700 people left homelessness last year, while more than 2,000 families left hotels and the majority of them went into homes. Now we have a record decrease in the number of people sleeping rough. Among the most vulnerable homeless, there has been a 40% decrease - about 110 in Dublin - but of course we need to do more. That is why we have Housing First under Bob Jordan, the new national director. A full 50 Housing First tenancies were secured in the first quarter of this year. That kind of rate of increase has never been done before. He has the mandate and the money and is working with local authorities to roll out the Housing First model across the country. That is going to work. It has worked well in other countries and it will work for us too.

I assure Senator Grace O'Sullivan that I have spoken to the Green Party leader about the cost rental model and I know her party's position on it. Indeed, her party tabled a motion in the Dáil on it recently which I would have supported, had it not mentioned specific sites. We have to be careful about identifying sites but cost rental has to be a part of our rental market as we look to the future.

Senator Warfield spoke about student accommodation. I think I have already addressed the issue around foreign investment and why I believe it is welcome. It is not Irish people selling property to each other at ever-inflating prices and sometimes foreign capital is not looking for super normal profit. In fact, a lot of the investors that I have met just want a steady return on their pensions. The current low interest rate market internationally means that people cannot get a return on their money. Significant pension funds, some of which are worth billions of euro, need safe havens and property can be a safe haven. Those pension funds will not have a problem with things like rent pressure zones or the capping of rent inflation because they see that as what is called a "steady Eddie". They know that they can invest for 20, 25 or 30 years in the rental market here and if the standards are good by international comparison, they will get a return on their money and we will get more housing into the market. Furthermore, we will not be exposed to some risks that may have existed in the past when the majority of investors were people in this country selling property to themselves.