Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is practically ready to go and we have communicated with local authorities over the year. They have their targets and know approximately what they will get and it is important that they plan for that. Some have made their plans and are implementing them, so there is no issue there. It is an issue for us. We need the BER certificates to be sure we are getting the value for taxpayers' money and to be able to recoup money from the EU. We hope they will come in quite soon. We are chasing them. The money will be spent on the voids and they will be brought back into use because we want them to do it that way. Local authorities will be asked to go beyond the targets.

The Senator mentioned that under Rebuilding Ireland every local authority has been given its targets for all the schemes. I stress they are minimum targets. Every local authority has been encouraged by me, the Minister and the officials at various meetings to go beyond those targets. The majority of councils went beyond their targets last year, and the Senator can see that in the tables. That is what we are trying to encourage. Some went 150% beyond and some 110% beyond.We met individually the local authorities that were below target to try to help them to come up to it because we want to reach it. Rebuilding Ireland involves a massive spend of almost €2.5 billion of taxpayers' money. It is important that we drive results through it, as I believe we are. This year we are on track to deliver more than 10,000 extra social housing homes. As that figure does not include all voids, there will be even more available. The number of new homes in the system will be 10,000 and it is important that we meet that milestone. All of the groups with which we have engaged in the past three or four years have asked us to get to the stage where, as a state, we deliver 10,000 homes a year. We are at that target this year and next year the number will be even higher. Under the ten-year capital plan under Project Ireland 2040, we have set aside money to provide 12,000 houses a year. That is far beyond for what anybody has asked, but that is where we should be and should stay in the coming years. The Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, and I are committed to doing so, with the Department and my party. I ask others to readjust their plans for any future Government to the same level because we have to continue to deliver social housing every year and must not have a repeat of what happened under previous Governments when we stopped building social houses.