Barry Cowen (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)
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529. To ask the Minister for Environment, Community and Local Government if he will provide, in tabular form, the number of local authority houses that were built, on a county basis, in 2011, 2012 and 2013; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [17384/15]

Alan Kelly (Tipperary North, Labour)
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My Department collates and publishes a wide range of housing and planning statistics that inform the preparation and evaluation of policy. It includes data on the number of local authority houses built, broken down by year, and those data are available on my Department’s website at: by clicking “Social Housing Outputs” under the Social Housing Supports heading.

Social housing is key priority for this Government, evidenced by the additional €2.2 billion in funding announced for it in Budget 2015 and the publication of the Social Housing Strategy 2020in November 2014. The total targeted provision of over 110,000 social housing units, through the delivery of 35,000 new social housing units and meeting the housing needs of some 75,000 households through the Housing Assistance Payment and Rental Accommodation Scheme, will address the needs of the circa 90,000 households on the housing waiting list.

The social housing targets that I recently announced for all local authorities are out to 2017 and include almost 7,500 units that will be capital-funded and 15,400 current-funded units. My announcement also contained provisional funding allocations which are sufficient to deliver the targeted units.

Following on from the target setting process, on 5 May 2015, I announced the first major direct build social housing programme under the Social Housing Strategy, with over 100 separate housing projects across all 31 local authorities. Details are available on my Department’s website at the following link: .