Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

We can have a long debate about the remit of NAMA. The NAMA vehicle was set up to take broken property-related loan books off the banking system and its remit was to try to minimise the financial exposure to the State. That is the remit it continues to work out, which is why it has - and it is unapologetic about it - a commercial remit to try to do that. It is predicting that by 2020 it can make a profit for the State of up to €2 billion.

Within that remit we are trying to work with NAMA to ensure the State gets the maximum dividend possible in terms of housing delivery in a timely manner, given the influence it has over loan books and the linked security of those loan books to landbanks and properties all over the place. We are trying to work with NAMA to maximise that dividend and we will continue to do that. However, to simply turn NAMA into a different entity would turn it into, essentially, a State agency which would bring its expenditure onto the books. That would cause all sorts of disruptive and negative impacts regarding what it would be allowed to spend. I am just saying that we need to be careful about that. I am not suggesting that NAMA does not have significant financial muscle, of course it does, but it is about how we use it and how clever we are in terms of managing budgets in a way that can deliver for us, without impacting on available spend.

I would like to see the State buying up properties - I have spoken to the Housing Agency and it has strong views on this as well - particularly vacant properties. I would like to see a purchase programme where the State looks for bargains in properties that may not be on the market but may be coming to the market in the next couple of years. I would like us to be proactively looking to acquire, particularly properties that are not occupied at the moment, to be able to increase the number of social housing units we have. This could involve talking to banks about the properties they have, whether they are properties linked to loans books or just in the private market generally. I absolutely believe that one of the ways to increase stock immediately is to simply acquire. The preference is to acquire vacant units where possible.

In regard to access to funding, theDeputy is correct in that there is no shortage of low-cost funding available at the moment. The problem is how does one spend it and through what vehicle? When a local authority borrows money and spends it the money gets added to the national debt. It is as simple as that. We have worked very hard in recent years to try to get our national debt levels down so caution is needed in how we finance what is clearly needed - an increase in the supply of housing units - and the mechanisms by which that is achieved. Deputy Cowen referred to the NARPS model which NAMA has been using and which is a very successful model. We are going to try to learn lessons from that and see if it can be replicated. There is also the Housing Finance Agency which is able to raise money at a very competitive cost. However, this money cannot simply be given to local authorities without there being a subsequent consequence in terms of public spending in any given year. Likewise, the credit unions want to be able to lend money to help solve the housing crisis, but again we need to make sure we can source money as cheaply as we can. The NTMA, as the Deputy is aware, can raise very significant amounts of money very cheaply, but that is not the problem. The problem is how does one spend the money in a way that does not undermine competition rules or require a commercial rate of return in order to avoid it being considered as national spend and to avoid State aid rules complications.

Deputy O'Dowd spoke of the lessons to be learned from the UK. I am going to Derry in the next few weeks where there is a very active social housing building programme. I am interested in really understanding how that programme works, seeing its successes and I presume some failures too.

Reference was made to a planning review. There are many active planning permissions out there. However, we need to be able to get decisions through the system quicker, particularly at An Bord Pleanála level.

It may be that more resources are required but we will not look at spending hundreds of millions of euro building houses to then have unnecessary delays because of the need for a half a dozen or a dozen people from a human resource point of view. If they are there, we need to ensure that we deal quickly with blockages that have solutions around human resources so that we have capacity to get things moving.

The point about land acquisitions is really important. State agencies and State-owned companies need to play their part in terms of supplying land banks to local authorities to build homes. Irish Rail is probably the best example.