Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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136. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, and Local Government the number of land purchases by local authorities that have been approved by his Department in 2019, 2020 and to date in 2021; if he will provide a list of these purchases including location and hectarage; and the financing provided to each local authority for each land purchase. [38401/21]

Peter Burke (Longford-Westmeath, Fine Gael)
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All local authorities acquire land on an ongoing basis for a wide range of uses, including housing developments. My Department provides funding to local authorities also on an ongoing basis where they use their land for social housing developments. Specific allocations of funding are not made to local authorities for land, rather each local authority makes its own decisions regarding land acquisition in line with their needs and my Department provides full funding in respect of the all-in capital costs - including land costs and construction costs, when land is used for the construction of new social housing.

To incentivise and support local authorities to further develop their landbanks, a new initiative has been confirmed for 2021 to support land acquisition where it is for new social housing developments. The focus with this initiative is land that is development-ready for housing, is appropriately zoned, which faces no other known obstacles to its development and where the local authority can work to a delivery programme to develop social housing as soon as possible on the site. In such cases, funding for the land will be provided by my Department when a local authority presents a social housing development proposal for the site. On the back of this initiative, local authorities are seeking suitable sites that can be acquired and funding will be provided by my Department as these are brought forward.

The amount of money spent by local authorities on land purchase in 2019 is set out in Appendix 5 of the Annual Financial Statement at the following link; www.gov.ie/en/collection/e103b-local-authority-annual-financial-statements/. This is the latest year for which there are fully audited accounts available for local authorities.