Mr. Derek Tynan:

I wish to comment very briefly on the suggestion of putting certain standards into development plans. As a practice that now does more student accommodation than we would like to and which does not do the 40% of social housing that was our business back in 2008 and 2009, we are well aware of the requirements under the variation of the development plan to quantify the percentage of student accommodation in any particular area. That is part of a planning application and it is very easy to put that in place. Likewise, one could have the regulation where it is stated that the developer must advance the issue of housing for older people.

As Mr. O'Mahony has said, it is an issue of demographic change. This is true for smaller units, be it for general mainstream housing or housing for older people. This is where the challenge is. Whether this is for 100 units per hectare, which I would call the "missing middle" where we would have to increase that density, or for larger schemes, we have to look at the models and develop those. The Netherlands has been far better than the UK in this regard. I recently came across the Housing our Ageing Population Panel for Innovation, HAPPI, which the committee may have heard of. It is five or six years old and is a series of exemplars of Dutch, Swiss and German principles for smaller unit, higher density five and six storey accommodation. I believe this is where we need to be. The difficulty is that the bungalow model will not work as we go forward. We have to look at encouraging and incentivising people into larger-scale buildings that can accommodate their needs and which are adaptable, in response to the Part M regulations. In the majority of cases, what we are building now is suitable for people of reasonable mobility as distinct from people who need specialised care.