Senator John McGahon- speech from 1 Feb 2021

Minister, very briefly, just to talk about voids in Lowth County Council, we've had 97 voids taken back into stock in the last year and we have families living in them. We've been one of the most ambitious local authorities in terms of taking voids back into use since 2016 when we were using CPOs to take vacant houses. So it's not all doom and gloom with other local authorities. In places like Donegal, like Senator Blaney said, and in places like my county in Lowth, our local authorities and our directors of services are absolutely flying with it. And in my last minute, I'd really like to pay tribute to the housing staff in Lowth County Council who have done tremendous work throughout COVID. That's whether there's people processing HAP over the phone, whether it's maintenance guys like Gerard Savage going into homes to really fix some serious issues. And the one issue I want to raise about very briefly about maintenance is this. We have a serious issue about funding for housing maintenance in Lowth County Council, where on average it's costing us about 350 per unit. It's a lot more expensive because there's more funding and other local authorities for it per unit. And the problem with that is that we have our engineers are ending up looking at looking at their budgets every week and are doing more about managing budgets rather than actually getting the work done in the first instance. And that leads on to the final point is, it will be brilliant once the national retrofitting scheme comes into play because that's actually going to fix a lot of the issues in the first place. And local authorities won't have to spend money on fixing houses and doors and etc. If you could give any indication when that scheme is due to take place, that would be brilliant.