Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 17 October 2023
341. Deputy Brian Stanley asked the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage his plans through further resources to aid Dublin City Council in dealing with its significant backlog in conveyancing works (details supplied). [45277/23]
Amharc ar fhreagraFor 2023, the Government has agreed that there will be increased provision for social housing acquisitions and my Department will fund local authorities to acquire at least 1,500 social homes. The additional acquisitions will be focused on properties where a tenant in receipt of social housing supports has received a Notice of Termination due to the landlord’s intention to sell the property. My Department issued a circular letter to all local authorities setting out details of these arrangements and each local authority was provided with a provisional target for social housing acquisitions in 2023 and these allocations are being kept under review.
Details of social housing acquisitions will be published as part of the comprehensive programme level statistics published by my Department on a quarterly basis. This data is available for all local authorities to the end of Quarter 2 2023 and is published on the statistics page of my Department’s website at the following link: www.gov.ie/en/collection/6060e-overall-social-housing-provision/.
Conveyancing services are strictly a matter for the Local Authority. Dublin City Council have advised that they have completed two hundred and forty eight acquisitions. Currently there are over two hundred individual property transactions at conveyancing stage. Of these properties one hundred and fifty six of these being tenant in situ acquisitions.
The conveyancing stage of these transactions can take from eight to twelve weeks to complete, and Dublin City Council has for operational reasons outsourced some of its standard conveyancing work to a number of Solicitors firms.
This decision does not imply a lack of internal resources within Dublin City Council. Outsourcing forms part of the usual work of the Law Department as and when the need arises.
The decision to outsource in this case was to streamline a process for tenant in situ acquisitions which are naturally time bound transactions, based on the notice of termination date served by the Landlord. Outsourcing this work has allowed DCC the flexibility to significantly scale up within a short period of time the number of property acquisitions which can progressed through the system, without effect on the other legal work carried out by directly by in house DCC legal teams.
