Mr. Danny Owens:

To address an issue raised by Senator Boyhan, while the purpose of the meeting is to examine the funding model, it is also important to consider the utilisation of this funding and how it is spent, particularly in terms of value for money for local authority housing. Many councillors are disenchanted because the role of local authorities in building houses has been considerably diminished as a result of the advent of approved housing bodies. This raises a serious longer-term issue. In the short term, there is an economic argument for using approved housing bodies but that is not true in the longer term.

A small number of local authority homes are built in County Offaly. While building directly is more costly to the State initially, the benefits of doing so are obvious. The houses built by councils become an asset from which an income is gained and the council retains the house when it has been paid off. That is not the case under the approved housing body model under which we hand over approximately 30% of the cost of building houses to these bodies. This is dead money which will never achieve anything. We do not own the asset and we have less input into the allocation of the completed homes. This approach must be reviewed. I am not making a political point because it has been presided over by successive Governments. It is important that we address this in the long term rather than in the short term because housing provision by local authorities is an aspect of policy that must be addressed very soon.