Dáil Éireann Debate, Thursday - 18 December 2025
504. Deputy Seán Ó Fearghaíl asked the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage the key measures taken to expand social housing provision during 2025; his priorities for 2026; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [73534/25]
View answerSince the beginning of 2022, Government has supported the delivery of 35,163 new social homes across thousands of individual projects funded through build, acquisition and leasing programmes.
Building on progress made to date the new Housing Plan, Delivering Homes, Building Communities aims to deliver 300,000 new homes in the period to 2030, including 72,000 social homes and 90,000 starter home supports. The Plan seeks to significantly scale-up delivery of new build social homes over the coming years, increasing from an average of 8,000 or so homes a year at present to an average of 12,000 per year.
In 2025, Government has allocated almost €7.5 billion in capital investment for Housing, inclusive of Land Development Agency investment and Housing Finance Agency (HFA) lending. The 2025 capital funding is supplemented by €1.93 billion in current funding to address housing needs.
This record level of investment for the delivery of housing will continue in 2026 with €5.2bn in Exchequer capital funding complemented by investment through the Land Development Agency (LDA) and lending from the Housing Finance Agency (HFA), bringing the total capital funding for housing in 2026 to over €9 billion.
The Government remains committed to increasing social housing delivery and a key focus of the social housing programme is to increase the number of new-build homes.
To incentivise local authorities to deliver more ‘own build’ projects, a new performance fund will be established. Where a local authority exceeds their ‘own build’ target they will receive additional discretionary funding for the delivery of community and placemaking initiatives and projects. In addition, ring-fenced 'new-build' housing delivery teams in each local authority dedicated to own build new social and affordable housing delivery will be fully funded by my Department through reimbursement to local authorities on a performance pay basis.
Delivering Homes, Building Communities will further support additional social housing delivery by mandating the use of standard house layouts and specifications as part of the new approval process and facilitate the use of Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) through a standardised design approach. To further promote the delivery of social housing I will embed the use of a Design and Build contract approach in all local authorities and the AHB sector in order to expedite the delivery of social housing.
Additionally, the new ‘single approval’ process for all new build social housing projects up to a value of €200m will support local authorities to streamline processes and encourage delivery of larger new build social housing developments.
Furthermore, the Land Acquisition Fund will be reformed, streamlined and expanded to ensure it is fit for purpose and can support the level of ambition in the Plan. To this end, the fund will also be increased from the current €239m to at least €500m.
The newly established Housing Activation Office (HAO) will identify and seek to address barriers to the delivery of public infrastructure projects required to enable housing development, through the alignment of funding; and co-ordination of infrastructure providers.
In addition to these measures, Government will establish a revamped contractor-led renewal programme focused on tackling dereliction and vacancy.
In 2025, my Department has provided €375 million to support a second-hand acquisitions programme. The programme supports priority categories of need, including exits from homeless services, tenancy sustainment (tenant in situ), people with a disability and older persons requiring urgent housing responses, and Buy and Renew acquisitions tackling vacancy. €50 million of this funding was ring fenced to target acquisitions that support households, primarily larger families with children, to exit long-term emergency accommodation arrangements.
I expect the 2026 programme to maintain support for the priority categories and individual local authority allocations, will be agreed and notified to local authorities early next year.
My Department publishes comprehensive programme-level statistics on a quarterly basis on social and affordable housing delivery activity by local authorities and Approved Housing Bodies (AHBs) in each local authority. This data is available to the end of Q2 2025 and is published on the statistics page of my Department’s website (www.gov.ie/en/collection/6060e-overall-social-housing-provision/).
These figures show that from the beginning of 2020 to the end of Q2 2025, over 35,000 new homes have been delivered under social housing build programmes.
In the first six months of 2025, 1,804 new build social homes were delivered. This is an increase of almost 54% on the same period in 2024 (1,174).
The latest Construction Status Report shows that the social housing pipeline is strong and continues to grow with 11,557 social homes currently onsite with an additional 15,127 homes at design and tender stage. In Quarter 2 2025, 141 new construction schemes (2,478 homes) were added to the pipeline. The most recent publication was for Quarter 2 2025. All CSRs are available at the following link: www.gov.ie/en/collection/cb885-social-housing-construction-projects-status-reports/
