Vacant Properties

Tuesday, 26 April 2022

Questions (657)

Thomas Gould

Question:

657. Deputy Thomas Gould asked the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage the reason that there are no targets for tackling vacancy in the Town Centres First policy. [20378/22]

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Written answers

Minister of State at the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage

‘Town Centre First – A Policy Approach for Irish Towns’ is the Government’s overarching strategy for the renewal and regeneration of Irish Towns. The creation of this Town Centre First (TCF) policy is an objective of the Programme for Government and it was published on 4th February 2022. The policy was jointly developed by my Department and the Department of Rural and Community Development and it supports established national policy objectives in the National Planning Framework, Housing for All and Our Rural Future. Town Centre First sets out 33 specific actions which provide a co-ordinated framework to address the decline in the health of our towns and sets out actions to regenerate and revitalise them. All these actions have either implicit targets related to delivering better outputs and outcomes for the development of town centres or explicit output unit targets where relevant.

Addressing vacancy and maximising the use of existing housing stock is a primary objective of the Government and there are number of measures provided for in the Town Centre First policy which support commitments in the Housing for All strategy to address vacancy and dereliction. In particular, the Croí Cónaithe (Towns) Fund under Action 26 will be delivered by local authorities for the provision of both serviced sites for housing, to attract people to build their own homes and also to support the refurbishment of vacant and derelict properties, enabling people to live in small towns and villages, in a sustainable way. The Croí Cónaithe (Towns) Fund aims to facilitate the making available of some 2,000 sites for homes by 2025 and a pathfinder programme is currently under consideration and it is expected that a call for proposals will issue to the local authorities shortly.