My Department is supporting local authorities in the provision of new build social housing through a range of different initiatives, including the construction of social homes on their own lands, construction delivery in conjunction with Approved Housing Bodies and also, local authorities are working in partnership with private developers to deliver social housing construction through turnkey arrangements.
Through this range of supports, local authorities now have substantial pipelines of new build social housing projects approved, details of which can be seen in the quarterly social housing construction status reports published by my Department. The report covering the period up to the end of first quarter of 2018 is available on the Rebuilding Ireland website at the following link: http://rebuildingireland.ie/news/minister-murphy-publishes-social-housing-construction-status-report-q1-2018/.
These construction status reports include construction schemes being delivered through the range of different programmes. Those listed as "SHIP Construction" are new build schemes taken forward by local authorities usually on sites they own or have acquired and, in most cases, the local authority will have procured a design team externally and in all cases, will contract the construction of the new social homes to private developers. "SHIP Turnkey" projects are separately identified in the report and are construction schemes where local authorities contract private developers to construct new housing, usually taking advantage of designs - which are fully building regulation compliant - and planning permissions that are already in place. Of the total local authority build output in 2017 of 1,014, there were 386 delivered through local authority turnkey contracted projects.
The construction status reports are also published on Ireland's open data portal in a format that allows the identification of the different delivery programmes and different local authorities. The fourth quarter 2017 report is available in open data format at the following link: https://data.gov.ie/dataset/social-housing-construction-status-report-q4-2017. The first quarter 2018 Report referred to above will be added to the open data portal very shortly.
