Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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160. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, and Local Government when he expects the delivery of the 20,000 homes including 8,000 discounted price homes assisted through the Local Infrastructure Housing Activation Fund which was to see the delivery of these homes by the end of 2019; the status of the spreadsheet of each LIHAF funded project including the number of discounted units delivered to date; and the price of the discounted units. [29871/20]

Darragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Fianna Fail)
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As an initiative of the Rebuilding Ireland Action Plan for Housing and Homelessness, the Local Infrastructure Housing Activation Fund (LIHAF) was primarily designed to support housing supply by funding the provision of public off-site infrastructure to relieve critical infrastructure blockages and enable housing developments to be built on key sites at scale.

30 projects received final LIHAF approval with an overall budget of €195.7m, of which €146.8m will be Exchequer funded, with the remainder funded via local authorities. Of the 30 projects, Kildare County Council has confirmed that its project on the Naas Inner Relief Road will not now progress, although an element of the housing that was associated with the project has taken place.

Details of the approvals by local authority area, budget allocation, project description and projected housing delivery are available at .

Currently, 3 LIHAF projects have completed infrastructure construction. Of the remaining 26, up to the end of September (and excluding the Naas project), 14 projects have been approved to go to, or are already at, infrastructure construction stage. Of the remaining 12 projects, one is expected to have a tender approved in Q4 2020 and go to construction in Q1 2021.

Eleven are not yet ready to go to infrastructure tender stage which is required in order to receive approval to proceed to construction. Of these eleven, five are advancing through the detailed design and planning stage and the remaining six projects are currently under review. My Department while reviewing these projects will consider requests from local authorities for extensions to the funding agreements as and when they arise.

In terms of homes delivered, the table below details the number of completed homes up to Q4 2019. Figures in respect of 2020 delivery are currently being collated.

The individual sales price of homes that are delivered following the construction of the LIHAF facilitating infrastructure is not available in my Department. However, by way of example, in Adamstown South Dublin, over 1,500 LIHAF enabled homes are already completed or contracted and 500 more homes are under construction. Within the large-scale delivery of homes, there are 300 homes at, or below, a cost of €300,000 and a further 500 at or below €320,000. These have been delivered by leveraging the LIHAF funding and the average discount applied across all 800 discounted homes will be approx. €25,000 per unit.

Meath County Council has confirmed units at Ratoath will be at a discount of 10% to the relevant open market prices. In Cork, the LIHAF project at Glanmire will see 110 homes delivered with a discount of approx. €20,000 each on the open market price.

The construction of housing by developers on lands which benefit from LIHAF funding is separate from the local authority-led delivery of the infrastructure, both contractually and in terms of delivery schedules.

For the majority of LIHAF projects sites, housing construction is expected to commence after the construction of the infrastructure has begun, so the timelines for housing delivery are generally in 2021 and beyond.