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

Essentially, elected members in local authorities will be asked to sign up to this process although they will be completely blind to the extent of the potential financial liability, say, per unit delivered. With social housing, we know roughly - the managers will tell us - that, for example, in a big urban area the benchmark is usually around €200,000 per unit. Elected members are being asked to sign up to a completely new model for delivering social housing but will not, as I understand it, know what that cost is.

Again I go back to the question I asked about the rapid build units. I know they are different processes. The Minister announces a benchmark, a funding allocation for the delivery of 59 rapid units in Clondalkin before planning permission has even been approved. That gives everybody entering the tendering process a sense of the very upper limit. The Secretary General is right that a smart tenderer is not going to go for that. There is a fair amount of distance between the €245,000 per unit that the Minister announced, essentially, and the cost of delivering a standard social unit. That information is available although I presume it is more for publicity purposes for the Minister. We are talking about large numbers of units. In Clondalkin, the area I am particularly concerned about, it is 100 units, while across Dublin it is 500, and then this could roll out on a still larger scale. Surely there has to be some mechanism, whether in the context of the area committees or a strategic policy committee, SPC, for elected members to know what we are talking about, at least roughly, without compromising the tendering or procurement process.