Patricia Ryan (Kildare South, Sinn Fein)
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370. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, and Local Government if he will bring forward notification from his Department to county councils regarding the amount of grants payable to them; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [36377/20]

Darragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Fianna Fail)
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My Department has a wide and diverse business agenda, covering a broad range of functions including local authority housing, voluntary housing, homeless services, estate regeneration, energy efficiency retrofitting, housing grants, rural water schemes, urban renewal/regeneration, and fire services. To achieve its business objectives, my Department allocates significant resources to local authorities and other organisations.

In order to deliver on this broad business agenda, my Department recoups expenditure incurred by local authorities under the terms and conditions of the relevant schemes.  Claims from local authorities in respect of such schemes, submitted with the requisite supporting information, are normally assessed, verified and paid on a recoupment basis and processed in a prompt manner. 

My Department continues to assist local authorities by bringing forward payments where possible. To this end, all of the Local Property Tax (LPT) allocations for 2020, amounting to €516.8m in total have been paid to local authorities. 

I can confirm that the LPT allocation process for 2021 is unchanged from recent years and that my Department informed local authorities of their pre-variation LPT allocations in July, as is normally the case, based on collection data provided by the Revenue Commissioners. This was to ensure that local authority members, in line with their statutory responsibilities, could make informed decisions on LPT variation by the end of September deadline. Taking account of those local variation decisions, local authorities were notified last month of their LPT allocations for 2021, amounting to €530m. I have no plans to revisit the allocation process for either 2020 or 2021 at this point.

Funding allocated by agencies under the remit of my Department is a matter for the bodies concerned.  Arrangements have been put in place by each agency under the aegis of the Department to facilitate the provision of information directly to members of the Oireachtas.  The contact email addresses for each agency are set out below: