Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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528. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, and Local Government the number and cash value of new CALF loans provided to approved housing bodies in each of the years from 2000 to 2016 and to date in 2017, in tabular form. [40193/17]

Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael)
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The Capital Advance Leasing Facility, CALF, introduced in 2011, is a facility which is exclusively available to Approved Housing Bodies (AHBs) to assist them in accessing private or Housing Finance Agency (HFA) finance for the purchase, construction or refurbishment of units that will then be made available for social housing purposes under the Social Housing Current Expenditure Programme (SHCEP). Essentially, the facility works by providing AHBs (where approved) with a small capital advance in the form of a loan, limited to 30%, that will be made available by the Department through local authorities to AHBs.

The facility is only available as part of a project where the AHB makes units available under a payment and availability (P&A) agreement to nominees of the housing authority for a set period of time. Repayments on the loan (capital advance) are not required during the term of the P&A agreement but the amount will remain outstanding at the end of the agreement. The purpose of this, and indeed the whole facility, is that the capital advance should assist AHBs in securing finance to purchase/construct units and make projects more viable for AHBs from a liquidity or cash flow perspective, particularly in the initial years.

The table sets out the number of CALF proposals and units approved by year since 2011 in addition to corresponding CALF funding approved. The table does not include proposals which were approved and subsequently withdrawn or CALF proposals under the Mortgage to Rent scheme.

Loans are provided to Approved Housing Bodies by Local Authorities and subsequently recouped from my Department. Unit delivery and drawdown may occur in a different year to approval, and may be drawn in phases depending on the structure of the scheme.  To date almost €94m has been drawn down by AHBs from Local Authorities.