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Minister of State at the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government:
I propose to take Questions Nos.119, 180 and 198 together.
The most recent three yearly assessment ofneed for social housing was carried out by localauthorities in March 2005. Returns were received
in my Department over the summer period. The data are now being finalised and will be published
very shortly.
The Government has been making substantial progress in addressing the concerns raised in the
NESC report, with record housing output levels
and increased investment in social and affordable housing measures. New measures have already
been announced to accelerate the delivery of
affordable housing and to maximise the availability of land for social and affordable housing
programmes. The Government indicated at that stage that the more medium-term issues highlighted
by NESC, particularly in the social and
affordable housing area, would be addressed later in the year.
The NESC report advocated a significant increase in the social housing stock and by way
of illustration argued for a social housing stock possibly to as many as 200,000 units by 2012. The
NESC acknowledged, however, that the appropriateness of the overall scale of ambition and the
urgency of actions would be clearer after the completion of the 2005 assessment of housing
need. The Government’s consideration of this matter will therefore be informed by the outcome
of the statutory housing needs assessment being finalised at present and the work by the housing
forum in reviewing the effectiveness of the existing
social and affordable housing schemes in the context of the Sustaining Progress agreement. I
anticipate the announcement of a new statement of housing policy at the end of this year.
For the purposes of undertaking the 2005 housing needs assessment, my Department issued
guidelines to local authorities requesting them to
contact applicants included in a previous assessment or subsequently accepted for inclusion in
the next assessment to see whether they are still seeking to be housed. Local authorities were
requested to carry out an extensive search for any
of their existing applicants who did not respond to their requests to update information in relation
to their applications. It is understood that in many instances this involved local authorities
writing to the applicant up to three times and
attempts were also made in some instances to contact applicants by phone.
It is a matter for individual local authorities to decide, having regard to efforts made to contact
applicants, to decide on the status of applicants for waiting list purposes. My Department has no
function in these individual decisions. Equally, it
is a matter for individual local authorities to decide whether a housing applicant who has
failed to notify the local authority of where he or she is residing should be reinstated on the waiting
list with retrospective recognition of a previous
application.
Previous housing needs assessments were carried out in 2002, 1999 and 1996. Information on
the number of households in need of housing in the four Dublin authorities was published in my
Department’s September quarterly edition of the
housing statistics bulletin for those years, copies of which are available in the Oireachtas Library.
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