Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

65. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government his views on the recent figures released by the CSO with regard to housing in the context of the Rebuilding Ireland targets. [20060/17]

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

Rebuilding Ireland is a multi-stranded, action-oriented approach to achieving the Government’s housing objectives, as set down in the Programme for a Partnership Government. At its heart it aims to increase housing supply, across all tenures, to 25,000 homes per year by 2021. The 25,000 target was the ESRI estimate of the housing requirement based on demographic change, household formation and a level of obsolescence of existing stock.

An additional 47,000 social housing units will be delivered by 2021, from a budget of €5.35 billion. In this context, the recent publication by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) of Census 2016 data relating to Housing in Ireland is a very useful information resource that will inform the ongoing implementation of Rebuilding Ireland, while also assisting with the further development of housing and planning policy in a variety of ways, including in the context of better understanding household formation patterns generally and responding to specific needs such as, for example, those of an ageing population or of persons with disabilities, etc.

New data added to Census 2016 in respect of vacant units is particularly useful as my Department finalises the draft National Vacant Housing Reuse Strategy, which I will bring to Government in the coming weeks, in order to advance the work on bringing vacant homes back into use, as envisaged under Pillar 5 of Rebuilding Ireland.