John Cummins (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy O'Donnell and I thank the Minister of State, Deputy Noonan for also being here for the motion. This is an area about which I am very passionate. I have been involved in countless projects in County Waterford with the goal of bringing vacant and derelict properties back into productive use for housing purposes.

As Senator Fitzpatrick said, the joint committee has spent a lot of time discussing this issue and coming up with proposals. Many of these have been implemented in recent years by the Government. The commercial to residential use exemption from planning has been introduced. It was extended to former pubs which had not been the case until last year. It is delivering more homes for individuals and families.

We introduced the repair and lease scheme, which has worked exceptionally well in County Waterford. In fact, 50% of all repair and lease units in the country have been delivered in Waterford. I looked at the most recent statistics. Unfortunately there are still five local authorities in the country that have failed to deliver a single unit under the repair and lease scheme. This year only 20 of the 31 local authorities delivered in the repair and lease scheme up to the second quarter of this year. I hope this improves. When the chief executive officers and local authority director of services were before the Oireachtas joint committee I asked each of them why they were not delivering under the scheme. One of the reasons they cited was that €60,000 was not enough. The Minister of State and his colleague the Minister of State, Deputy O'Brien increased it to €80,000. In my book there is no excuse for any local authority not to deliver under the repair and lease scheme.

We also introduced the vacant property tax, which has been increased to five times what it was. It is a case of using the carrot and stick approach.What has worked well in Waterford, which has managed to reduce its vacancy level hugely? It is a good example case. It was the local authority, the estate agents, the local contractors, the owners of properties and members of the public all working in a collaborative fashion in order to identify properties, make them aware of the schemes - such as repair and lease, and buy and renew - and using the stick of the CPO where necessary. The Minister of State’s own county has done huge work in terms of CPOs. I asked officials these questions at the Oireachtas joint committee. It has done them under the Derelict Sites Act as opposed to the Housing Act. It is much quicker, to speak to Senator Sherlock’s point, to get that vesting order and work through the process through the derelict sites legislation. You put the notice on the door - which I see in Waterford all the time - you notify them that the property is on the derelict sites register, you then go with the CPO notice and you get a vesting order very quickly as opposed to through the Housing Act, which can take a considerable amount of time.

I do not believe there is actually as much of an issue with the CPO process as is put out there. To assist that, we have put €150 million of a fund in place for local authorities to reduce and eliminate the risk associated with the CPO process. Heretofore, if a council decided to go with a CPO, the council was at the financial risk if it was contested, ended up in court and all of the rest of it. Now there is a revolving fund of €150 million across all of the local authorities that they can draw on. When they get the property into ownership, they can either do it up under the buy and renew scheme themselves or they can sell it on to the private sector, recoup that money and put it back into the fund to move on to the next one.

A huge amount of work has been done by Government in this space. Can we do more? I honestly believe that the mechanisms are all in place now. It is a case of local authorities doing the work on the ground to tackle those issues. Some are doing an excellent job and others leave much to be desired. That is the bottom line. It is not a case of passing the buck from Government, rather it is just some local authorities have grasped this nettle and run with it and others have, frankly, run away from it, which is unacceptable. In order to tackle this issue across the country, it takes all levers of the State. It takes the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage putting the mechanisms, schemes and funding in place. However, ultimately, on the ground, it is about the local authorities using all of those levers in order to bring properties back into productive use for housing, which is what we all want in this House, right across Government and the political divide.

I commend the Minister of State on the work that has been done. The vacant property refurbishment grant, which was referred to, on top of all of that is the icing on the cake, to be honest. It has given people that had a property but not the financial wherewithal the firepower to be able to do something about it. I am not shy in saying that if somebody is not using all of those carrots and the suite of measures been put in place by the Government, they should be taxed on it or the property should be subjected to a CPO. We have put those measures in place. I hope nobody will suggest that schemes and measures have not been put in place by the Government because, frankly, there have been a huge variety of them. I commend the Minister of State and his colleagues on the work they continue to do.