Ciarán Cuffe (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party)
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Question 63: To ask the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government the number of acres or hectares of agricultural land that have been rezoned for development nationally; and the breakdown by local authority area for each year since 2000 to date in 2006. [42606/06]

Dick Roche (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)
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Section 10 (2) (a) of the Planning and Development Act 2000 provides that a planning authority's development plan shall include objectives for the zoning of land for the use solely or primarily of particular areas for particular purposes (whether residential, commercial, industrial, agricultural, recreational, as open space or otherwise, or a mixture of those uses). Also, Section 13 (1) of the Act provides that a planning authority may at any time, for stated reasons, decide to make a variation of a development plan. Accordingly, the details of land zoned from agricultural to development (which could be residential, commercial or industrial) would be set out in each planning authority's development plan. My Department does not seek or retain these details.

My Department does however carry out a survey, through the local authorities, of the total amount of serviced land zoned for residential purposes, owned both privately and by local authorities, at the end of June each year. This survey is valuable in assessing the overall stock of land at the same point each year, and the sufficiency of that stock to underpin required housing supply. Details from the survey are published annually in my Department's Annual Housing Statistics Bulletin, copies of which are available in the Oireachtas library, and on my Department's website.

While figures from the June 2006 survey are still being compiled, the results of the June, 2005 survey indicate that there were some 14,000 hectares of residentially zoned land available at that time to support future housing supply, with an estimated yield of about 460,000 housing units nationally.