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

He is not saying the minimum has to be the same as the maximum. He is saying that the minimum standard becomes a floor. We have to allow people to apply to build at that standard as opposed to moving it higher. As the Deputy probably knows, 44% of people on social housing lists are living on their own. Some 25% of households in Ireland are single-occupancy households. I know that because of the water debates; we were looking at the statistics yesterday in terms of how we should be setting the benchmark for excess water usage and so on. Many of those people potentially could and should be living in city or town centres.

We have to use space more efficiently, through better design. That is something Deputy Ryan talks about a lot in terms of density, quality of living and so on. That is the context in which we want to have a minimum size below which we do not go. By the way, it is considerably bigger than the minimum size in many countries.

Anyone who stays in an apartment in Paris would see shoeboxes all over the place. There are tiny apartments that, in many cases, are just like tiny hotel rooms. We are not allowing that any longer. We are not allowing bedsits any longer. It is up to developers to design and use space more efficiently. Anybody who has looked at, for example, some of the apartments in the new Cherrywood development that use the minimum space required will have seen that, by using light, space and open-plan design differently, a lot more can be fitted into a smaller space. Anyone who looks at those show apartments would see that, for a certain type of person, they are very good quality accommodation. It is probably not family accommodation. We need to ensure that there is family accommodation too. The only point I am making is that if we do not have a common minimum standard across the country we will see different local authorities doing very different things. We would be asking the regulator to do an impossible job. It would potentially have to factor in 31 different sets of standards, as opposed to having a common basic standard in terms of what is acceptable and what is not. That is the only point I am making.