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

I thank the witnesses for their presentations. I will make a number of comments and then ask two key questions. I appreciate that people like me know far less about the how the procurement and tendering process works than the witnesses but from the outside, I see competent officials in local authorities and in the Department who have to continually go back and forth through that still very long four-stage approval process to take decisions. Why can that decision-making process not be located in one of those competent bodies rather than both? There must be the capacity for an approval and procurement process that is substantially shorter than the existing process, which would still allow officials to meet all the requirements in terms of quality build and quality approval of taxpayers' money. I cannot understand how that is not possible. The fact that two different arms of the State have to go back and forth is the key part of the problem. I acknowledge the Minister is examining this but the more I hear from him about shortening the Part VIII process, as his first pronouncement, the more I wonder why he cannot focus on prioritising the shortening of the approval and procurement process. I urge action in this regard.

Ms Nic Aongusa referred to the considerable body of international research on mono-tenure estates. This is more frustrating for me because I do not believe there is a considerable body of research and that has clearly been Government policy for quite some period. However, research by some of the State's most respected housing academics, Professor Tony Fahey and Dr. Michelle Norris, in a seven-state study from ten years ago and a follow-up study, shows that there are strong merits to as well as issues in respect of mono-tenure estates. However, those issues have less to do with the tenure mix and more to do with investment and social and economic infrastructure. The difficulty is there is a huge housing need, particularly for those people for whom the market will never provide housing and for whom social housing is the option. If there cannot be large-scale social housing build because of the constraints of the sustainable communities approach, then there will be large numbers of small infill projects - the majority of new builds under the current strategy are small infill projects in areas that have high concentrations of social housing and, therefore, are in breach of the sustainable communities ethos - or there will be smaller numbers of Part V units on private housing estates because of the new regulations. Since this model was introduced, there has been no research to prove that putting 10% or 15% of lower-income families on large or private estates creates integration. Many of us argue there is much less integration on those estates because of the way they are designed. I cannot see how with the constraints of the sustainable communities approach and low levels of investment in public housing this problem will be tackled.

The focus that Mr. Cummins placed on the private sector is part of the problem. The whole reason we call it the social housing sector is because the market cannot meet the needs of those people. For us to think that the market will be key to reducing that acute level of housing need is symptomatic of the problem.

We have a high level of need and we have plenty of available, good quality public land. We have low-cost finance and enormous expertise in our local authorities, in the Department, the Housing Agency and the Housing Finance Agency. The key is how those groups of people are put together to deliver. We can have private builders but not the private sector driving it. Surely we can have mixed tenure local authority estates where local authorities provide the land and set out the broad parameters on the basis of what is needed. They can be mixed tenure with some private, some cost-rental and some social housing. They can be funded, as the NTMA told us on Tuesday, off-balance sheet through a National Asset Residential Property Services, NARPS-type vehicle or through 100% Exchequer funding. It should be done in that way.

I will give the example of the Grange site and I have poor Billy's head twisted on this. South Dublin County Council has 44 acres of land. We could have a mixed tenure, local authority housing estate of 800 units there with spaces for schools and community facilities and it could be delivered by a competent local authority through a NARPS-type vehicle. What will we get instead under the existing Government strategy? We will get 100 houses in five years' time. I do not want to be awkward about it but if we continue with the same failed strategy that has got us into this mess, things will not change. Can we not start to look at mixed tenure, local authority or approved housing body led estates on a large scale with the funding that only a few days ago NTMA and Department of Finance officials told us is available? If we started to insert that into social housing strategy, we could look at producing a much larger number of units, greater levels of income mix and we could seriously start to tackle the social housing waiting lists.