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SOUTH DUBLIN COUNTY COUNCIL

MEETING OF SOUTH DUBLIN COUNTY COUNCIL

Monday, January 09, 2023

QUESTION NO. 1

QUESTION: Councillor Carly Bailey

To ask the Chief Executives for a report on social housing voids and to compare 2022 to 2018 inclusive. Report to include the average turn around time, to outline where the blockages are and what SDCC are doing to resolve this.

REPLY:

Our Housing Maintenance and Refurbishment section undertake re-let works on vacant housing stock throughout the County to ensure stock is brought back into productive use for letting as soon as possible.  In 2022, re-let works have been completed on vacancies arising in 177 Council-owned social homes (compared to 139 properties in the whole of 2021).  The cumulative average time for these properties to be re-let to date in 2022 is 28.39 weeks, which represents an improvement of over 17% on the final overall re-let times for 2021.  While various measures are being implemented and explored to continue to improve this figure, it has been significantly impacted in recent years by various construction sector challenges as well as Covid-19 related issues, and, going forward, is particularly contingent on contractor resourcing/availability and acceptance of offers of accommodation following Choice Based Letting expressions of interest.  Annual average re-let times from 2018 to 2022 were as follows:

Year	Relet Times (weeks)
2018	17.44
2019	22.00
2020	24.88
2021	34.43
2022	28.58

A detailed Relets Process Review report, separately attached, was presented to the Housing Strategic Policy Committee in November 2022 outlining all aspects of the process and targets for future improvement.