Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I want to tease out a little further the potential off-balance sheet options. We have a potentially significant investment capacity in ISIF and we have a vehicle that we know works in NAMA Asset Residential Property Services, NARPS, whether it is kept as NARPS or NARPS 2. The difficulty is that if it is used as a way of providing 100% social housing, there is no commercial return because social housing is subsidised by the State so it will fall foul on those grounds. The difficulty for many committee members is that if it is used for private housing with a Part V 10% commitment, it will not produce sufficient social housing to tackle the scale of the crisis we are concerned about. I am asking a question knowing that the witnesses probably will not be able to answer it. If, for example, NARPS, accessing ISIF funding, was to invite people with land, local authorities, approved housing bodies or whoever, to come forward with proposals for mixed tenure estates to include social housing, cost rental housing and affordable purchase housing, my preference would be for the local authorities to bring forward their landbanks and state they would like to provide 30% social housing, 30% cost rental and 30% cost or affordable purchase.

They would be local authority-managed estates, but the financing model would allow for a commercial return, both from the affordable sales and the cost rentals. Those could be used to ensure there was a commercial return to NARPS and the ISIF through the initial loan. It would allow them to produce housing on a scale which the 10% Part V commitment would not allow. It would also allow the leveraging of landbanks that many local authorities in Dublin city, south Dublin and others already have.

Deputy Brophy is wrong. It is not the case that the housing bodies do not want to borrow money. In fact, if one speaks to the five or six large approved housing bodies they will say they reckon that within a couple of years they could produce 4,000 units a year compared with the 1,500 or 1,600 produced at the current time. Even that capacity would not meet the need that exists. Could such a proposal be explored within the current framework? If we do not find some way of doing something like that, off-balance sheet schemes will simply involve private housing with 10% Part V social housing, which will provide nowhere near enough housing.