Tommy Broughan (Dublin Bay North, Independent)
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786. To ask the Minister for Environment, Community and Local Government the status of local authority land zoned and planning permission granted for up to 52,600 residential units; if funding has been released to local authorities to begin immediate building of these units; if not, the reason; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [6900/16]

Alan Kelly (Tipperary, Labour)
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The Housing Agency, in consultation with my Department and local authorities, is gathering data and developing a detailed database and GIS map of local authority owned lands, as well as the Land Aggregation Scheme lands, showing their location, size, boundaries and other information. Furthermore, my Department, in conjunction with local authority planning departments, carried out a national survey of all lands zoned for residential development in statutory local authority development plans and local area plans across Ireland. This exercise, the Residential Land Availability Survey 2014, published in February 2015, determined the location and quantity of lands that may be regarded as being undeveloped and available for residential development purposes at 31 March 2014. This survey measured the total amount of lands whether owned privately or by the local authority that have been identified for housing development in the various local authority development plans and that are the highest priority for development.

The area of such lands amounts to 17,434 hectares, which given a range of densities appropriate to whether the areas are in small villages or larger towns and cities and as determined by the relevant local authorities, could theoretically enable the construction of over 414,000 dwellings.

The Residential Land Availability Survey 2014 is available on my Department’s website at:

Statistics on planning permissions granted on a county basis are published by the Central Statistics Office; see . A new Part V (of the Planning and Development Act) regime has been introduced which means that social housing dwellings will be delivered as part of mixed tenure developments, thus ensuring that local authorities will have a steady stream of social housing units from the private sector for years to come.

In relation to new social housing construction, I made substantial announcements in May 2015, in July 2015 and in January 2016 through which we now have a strong pipeline of such construction projects, as well as acquisition and turnkey approvals in place.  Between these three announcements, almost €680 million has been allocated for over 3,900 social housing new builds and acquisitions. Details of these approvals are available on my Department’s website at the following links:

While construction activity is ramping up for social housing delivery, local authorities are using other approaches to deliver new social housing units in the more immediate term, including acquiring properties - with over 1,000 new social housing units acquired through that approach in 2015 alone - and working with developers to build and acquire new Turnkey developments.