Paul Murphy Challenges Minister on '10,000' Social Homes Claim

I'd like to ask the Minister to provide the figures for the number of new-built homes to be completed by each local authority by the end of 2019 and the reason I ask this question is because the Minister and the Government have made a bit of a mantra of saying that 10,000 social housing is going to be delivered this year and it's simply not true. I want the Minister to provide the figures on the record to demonstrate that it's not true and the Minister is engaging in spin that is worthy of Boris Johnson. Thank you, Chair. I propose to take questions 43 and 85 together. Earlier this year I published the 2019 targets for social housing delivery on a local authority basis and also by delivery mechanism including build, acquisition, leasing, HAP and RAS. Each quarter I publish details of progress against those targets and the quarter three 2019 outputs have just been published showing 66% delivery to the end of September or just under 18,000 households securing keys to a home under a social housing programme in the first nine months. All stakeholders recognise the critical need to continue to increase social housing supply through build activity. When Rebuilding Ireland was published in 2016, the construction activity base and pipeline in place was so low that the action plan's build targets had to be weighted towards the latter years of the six-year programme, recognising the time lag between project conception and then delivery. Therefore, in 2016 and 2017 the focus was on maximising delivery by returning vacant stock to active use and supporting the completion of vacant homes while in parallel a major programme was put in place to expand the build pipeline very significantly. This year we continue to see the fruits of the expansion of the social housing construction programme. The build target for 2019 is to deliver 6,545 homes, an increase of over 30% on last year's target. I and teams from my department have been meeting regularly with local authorities to ensure that every effort continues to be made to achieve this target and I am confident that we are on track to deliver close to the full target. The Social Housing Construction Status Report, which is published on a quarterly basis on the Rebuilding Ireland website, provides very detailed information on build activity in each local authority, including the number of homes on site and actively being delivered. It should be noted that in addition to the homes being built this year, over 3,400 further social homes are to be delivered through acquisition and leasing schemes. Indeed, in total, we are committed to ensuring that more than 27,000 households are supported across all of the social housing programmes this year, bringing to 100,000 the number of households that will have been supported since 2016. Next year, over 11,000 social housing homes will be delivered through build, acquisition and leasing programmes. This includes over 7,500 newly built social housing homes, which will be 11 times the level in 2016, the first year of rebuilding Ireland, and will be the highest number of such homes to be built this century. I and my department will continue to work proactively with local authorities and approved housing bodies to ensure that this and other targets continue to be met. Thank you. The Minister plays with figures and he plays with the definition of social housing in order to create confusion. To be clear, and the Minister did say it there, that the plan is to build 6,545 new homes. That's the plan. Not 10,000, not 20,000, not 27,000. 6,545 is the plan. And your 20,000, your 27,000, your 10,000, they're the equivalent of Boris Johnson's 50 new hospitals, 50,000 new nurses. Can the Minister confirm that the total number of actual new builds of that 6,545 by the first half of this year was only just over 1,000? So you have to ramp up construction to the extent of a 400% increase in the rate of construction in order to meet that target. And does the Minister accept that, in particular, out of the 10,000 he talks about, 2,130 homes are to be leased from private developers? They're going to be owned by private individuals, rented from the state and then rented out to people on social housing. That does not amount to social housing. Minister. Thank you, Chair. I'm not playing with figures, Deputy, and there's no grand conspiracy here. We published the targets for a reason. They include local authority build, housing body build, what's happening on private sites in terms of Part 5, what my department oversees or the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform approves. If those figures were made up, there would be a grand conspiracy across every local authority, every housing body and across government departments. So stop your nonsense, alright? Stop your nonsense and stick to the facts. This year we will increase the social housing stock by 10,000 homes. More than 6,000 of those will be directly built for social housing, either by local authorities, housing bodies or using the Part 5 process. We no longer rely on one stream of social housing delivery because what we learned from the past was to outsource it to the private sector would leave you completely exposed if the private sector failed. But to totally rely on one form of local authority delivery would leave you exposed if there was a difficulty in that local authority area for whatever reason. So we have a combination of local authorities, housing bodies and Part 5s, but local authorities do the heavy lifting by about 2 to 1 a factor in terms of them versus housing bodies. So get your ideology out of the way. It doesn't matter if it's a housing body building on local authority land or a local authority building on local authority land. There are social housing homes for people coming off the social housing lists. Thank you. Final comment, Deputy Murphy. Thanks. Yes, Minister, let's stick to the facts. So stop talking about 10,000 social homes being delivered this year. That's not true. Stop talking about 20,000 social houses being delivered. Stop talking about 27,000. Your plan is to build 6,545 new homes. Minister, you can't seriously claim that over 2,000 homes that are being leased from private developers amount to social housing. In what world is that social housing? There is no grand conspiracy, but instead what there is is a deliberate manipulation of the definition of social housing to pretend you're planning to do a lot more than you're doing. So that gives you much bigger targets than the reality of what your targets are. And it also distracts from the fact that you're not anywhere near your actual targets. Minister, it's your ideology which means that you're in favour of simply incentivising landlords and developers to come into the market. You refuse to invest in public housing to deal with the housing crisis. You simply refuse to do it. And the landlords you represent, the developers you represent, are getting super rich as a consequence of that. And the idea that we have the ideology, you have no ideology, is utter nonsense. Thank you, Chair. Deputy, €2.4 billion is what we'll spend on housing this year. It's the largest amount we've ever spent in a single year by the Irish Government in housing. OK? That's our commitment to public housing. You don't understand how the BUILD programme works. Because in 2018, the exact same claims were made in quarter one, quarter two, quarter three. You won't meet your BUILD targets. By the end of 2018, we were 3% shy of them. So we've got thereabouts on our BUILD targets. 3% shy in terms of more than 4,000 homes, Deputy. But what you're claiming today is that we're nowhere near our targets. What I'm telling you is that we're very close to those targets and we'll know by the end of the year whether we achieve them or not. But it was the exact same narrative last year. It proved to be untrue. So you can stop with your untruths and you can stop with your spinning and you can get your ideology out of the way. Because these are real homes for people coming off the housing list. And that's what matters here, not your ideology. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.