Alan Kelly (Tipperary North, Labour)
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Since December 2011, my Department and the Housing Agency have been engaged with NAMA identifying properties that might potentially be suitable for social housing purposes.

Since the process began, up to end of June 2015, a total of 1,386 NAMA residential properties have been delivered for social housing use, comprising of 1,083 completed properties, with a further 303 that have been contracted and where completion work is on-going. A further 624 properties are active transactions whereby terms are agreed, active negotiation is on-going with all parties concerned, or where a detailed appraisal (i.e. determining the most likely delivery mechanism) is being carried out.

To the end of June 2015, NAMA had identified 6,542 residential properties controlled by its debtors and receivers under this initiative as being potentially available for social housing. Of this figure, 2,501 properties have a confirmed demand and are available for social housing.

The remaining 4,041 are no longer available for social housing purposes for a variety of reasons. In the case of 2,476 of the properties identified by NAMA, local authorities considered them unsuitable for social housing because of sustainable planning and housing policy issues or they were located in areas with no social housing demand. A further 1,565 units originally identified as available for social housing were subsequently discovered by NAMA to be unavailable.

Notwithstanding this, there is an ongoing process of reviewing units previously deemed unsuitable by local authorities. In particular, local authorities in high demand areas are continually reviewing the list of available NAMA properties to see if they are suitable to be brought into use as social housing.