Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Socialist Party)
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13. To ask the Minister for Environment, Community and Local Government the reason his Department’s estimates of the number of social housing units to be provided from a reformed Part V have fluctuated in the space of a few months, from 4,000 units during the period 2015 to 2020, that is, 666 units a year according to a press release on 2 October 2014, to 9,000 units during the period 2015 to 2020, that is, 1,500 units a year in Social Housing 2020, and then back to the original 4,000 during the period 2015 to 2020 in a written reply from his Department to a parliamentary question on this topic from this Deputy on 27 January 2015. [9102/15]

Alan Kelly (Tipperary North, Labour)
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Informed by a recent review of the provisions of Part V of the Planning and Development Acts, which included a public consultation process, proposed legislative changes have been set out in the General Scheme of the Planning and Development (No. 1) Bill which was published in November 2014 and is available on my Department’s website.

The General Scheme provides that, in future, the focus of Part V will be on the delivery of completed social housing units, with a requirement for up to 10% social housing in developments of 10 or more units. In the operation of these revised Part V arrangements, the priority will be to secure social housing units on-site; the making of cash payments in lieu of social housing units is to be discontinued. The Bill is currently being drafted in consultation with the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel with a view to its publication in the coming weeks and enactment before the Summer recess.

The changes to the Part V provisions that are proposed are a key component of the range of delivery mechanisms that will be required to achieve the targets set out in the Government’s Social Housing Strategy 2020. The Strategy stated, for illustrative purposes, that the changes proposed in relation to the Part V provisions "could yield approximately 1,500 units per annum on the basis of 25,000 homes being completed annually taking account of issues such as one-off or small housing developments that are not subject to Part V”.

However, it will take time for housing supply overall to reach that level. Given that just over 11,000 housing units were completed in 2014 and on the assumption that total housing output will increase gradually over the coming years, my Department’s estimate remains that in the region of 4,000 additional social housing units will be delivered by 2020 through the Part V mechanism.

My Department has written to local authorities in recent days instructing them to ensure that Part V agreements are discharged in ways that maximise the potential for the immediate delivery of social housing units.