Vacant housing and commercial units
Deputy Curran asked whether the Government would use vacant homes and commercial units to tackle rising homelessness. The Taoiseach and Minister Coveney said yes, and outlined plans including an extension of the repair-and-leasing initiative and a purchase-and-renew scheme.
The Minister for Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government recently published a social housing construction programme which sets out, scheme by scheme and stage by stage, each of the social housing projects. It is very clear from the programme that it will be several years before significant numbers of properties will be complete and ready for occupation yet every month we see figures for homelessness continue to increase.
The programme for Government states,"The Action Plan will look at existing housing stock that is uninhabited, and vacant commercial units, with a view to incentivising the refurbishment and change of use to homes." As the construction programme is under way in 2017 and 2018, can ambitious targets be brought forward in these areas to bring some of the very many unoccupied units back into use to help address the homelessness problem?
Comment on this
That is a good question and the answer is "Yes". The Minister, Deputy Coveney, will embellish that.
Comment on this
The Ceann Comhairle should give the Minister four minutes.
Comment on this
In view of the latitude the Ceann Comhairle has shown to many on the Opposition benches today, perhaps I will take a little bit of time on this.
The answer to the Deputy's question is "Yes". It takes time to build houses. We have huge demand today, next week and next month for social housing and more housing in the private rental market. That is why tomorrow we will launch the extension of the repair-and-leasing initiative begun in Carlow and Waterford. We will commit tens of millions of euro to that project this year. A total of €25 million will be spent on a purchase-and-renew scheme for local authorities and for approved housing bodies, AHBs. We spent €203 million last year buying over 1,000 vacant properties in order to bring them back into use. That will continue this year. A number of other schemes are envisaged. Within the next month or so, we will launch a vacant properties strategy for Ireland which is designed to bring properties that are not being used back into use and to pay for their repair if necessary. There is a lot happening in that space.