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

545. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, and Local Government the number of Part V's delivered in 2017, by local authority; the price paid by the local authority; the details of the lease agreements; the length of leases; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [38838/18]

Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

A total of 522 Part V units were delivered by local authorities and approved housing bodies (AHBs) for social housing in 2017.

There is no single dedicated Part V funding scheme administered by my Department as the mechanism for delivery of homes is a matter for the local authority in the first instance. Instead, local authorities harness the capacity of a variety of funding schemes in addition to utilising their own revenue to deliver Part V homes. Where the outcome of the Part V negotiation is for the local authority to purchase on-site or off-site homes from the developer, then one option for them is to recoup the costs through the main Social Housing Capital Investment Programme (SHCIP). Another option is to allocate the homes for delivery by an AHB who may also be working with the developer to deliver additional homes in the same development; in this scenario, the AHB may apply for Capital Advance Leasing Facility (CALF) funding (where loan funding for up to 30% of the capital cost is provided, with the AHB borrowing the balance) on the overall scheme, with the Part V homes incorporated into overall scheme costs. Finally, where the negotiation between the local authority and the developer results in a long- term lease arrangement, then there is no capital funding requirement and the homes are incorporated into the Social Housing Current Expenditure Programme (SHCEP) leasing scheme. 305 Part V units delivered in 2017 were delivered by AHBs under either the CALF scheme or SHCEP.

A Payment and Availability Agreement (P&A agreement) is the contract which forms the basis of the lease arrangement between the local authority and the AHB for the purposes of leasing a housing unit, regardless of how the housing unit is sourced. Agreements are generally for between 20 and 30 years. The basic principles behind the operation of the agreement are that the local authority identifies and nominates the tenants to be housed in these properties, and the local authority decides the rent to be paid by the tenant to the AHB in accordance with its Differential Rent Scheme. The local authority makes payments to the AHB on a regular basis which is recouped to the local authority by my Department. These payments are generally around 92% of market rent with rent reviews indexed to CPI every three or four years.

The attached document sets out the total Part V output by delivery stream with an average cost per local authority as at end 2017.