Barry Cowen (Offaly, Fianna Fail)
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265. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, and Local Government the criteria by which a housing unit is deemed to be a void unit for the purposes of the National Oversight and Audit Commission. [52452/17]

Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael)
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The National Oversight and Audit Commission (NOAC) is independent of the Department in the performance of its functions and I am therefore not in a position to comment on specific aspects of its work. However, NOAC may be contacted directly at .

Barry Cowen (Offaly, Fianna Fail)
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266. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, and Local Government the criteria by which a housing unit is deemed to be a void unit that has been returned for the purposes of the figures provided by his Department on same. [52453/17]

Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael)
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Vacant social houses, categorised as voids, are those in need of far greater levels of repair than normal re-letting works, to bring them up to a suitable letting condition. They are vacant pending that work.  

Strong funding support has been provided to all local authorities to remediate such vacant social housing so that the homes involved can be re-let as soon as possible. This exchequer funding is additional to funding that local  authorities themselves provide in order to bring vacant properties back into use.

The works carried out focus not just on returning vacant social homes to use as quickly as possible, but also on remediation work bringing long-term benefits, including insulation retrofitting which means the house, when re-let, has high comfort levels and less heating costs for the incoming tenant. Since the introduction of the Voids Programme, almost €100m in  exchequer funding has been made available to local authorities, with over 8,000 homes remediated  since 2014. 

As well as the above numbers of vacant social homes, there is a regular turnover of short-term vacancies in the social housing stock of local authorities, where a modest amount only of work is needed.  In general, these vacancies are addressed by the local authorities from their own resources.