Minister Alan Kelly promises a tenfold rise in social housing builds by years end

Environment Minister Alan Kelly has promised a tenfold increase in the number of social houses built before the end of the year.

This means up to 200 homes could be built before the end of December as the department’s own figures show that a total of 20 social houses were built in the first six months of this year by local authorities.

Mr Kelly said: “That figure by the end of the year will be substantially higher; I can assure you it will be substantially higher, up to ten times higher.

“The issue here is that the volume of sites is in excess of 200, myself and Junior Housing Minister Paudie Coffey will be announcing a lot more sites in the coming weeks,” he said, after holding a homelessness forum to discuss winter preparations with charities and NGOs.

“The number of local authority completions will be higher than what’s stated in the end of year figures. They will be significantly higher.”

Junior Housing Minister Paudie Coffey

Mr Kelly said he had to work to get local authorities on board as previously they had adopted a “wrong policy” of using private housing and rent supplement. He said local authorities had been “simply not willing to build local authority houses”.

“Local authorities, when there was funding, are, through previous administrations, basically privatised social housing. Now local authorities have been ramped back up to actually provide social housing,” he said.

“You can’t provide social housing overnight; there is a lag time of a couple of years.”

In the meantime Mr Kelly said as much funding as is required would be provided for making boarded-up and vacant homes habitable.

“We are quite happy with the level of turnaround the local authorities are engaged in with regards to other aspects of social housing while those social housing units are being built,” he said.

“We have told every local authority, particularly in pressure areas like the four in Dublin and Cork, Limerick, and Galway, that we will provide all money required to turn around voids as quickly as possible, which are social housing units that are boarded-up or not used at the moment.

“A couple of thousand were done last year and we expect more than 1,000 to be done this year.”

Mr Coffey said the meeting with homeless groups had been positive. “I think there was a very positive and frank engagement between us and we assured all of those agencies that both myself and Minister Kelly and department officials will be doing all within our power to support all of the good work that they are doing.”