Mr. Michael Cleary:

That is correct. As a practitioner, I have been involved for about 25 years on delivering on planning and development. We have been involved as development managers at the coalface with the good, the bad and the ugly, and the good again. I have some direct experience of this. I have a couple of points to make. One is similar to the point made by Ms Bryce, and that is that the delivery mechanisms are very difficult to get up and going again. For ten years the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, led the way in trying to revitalise the industry overall. It took some years to get even commercial projects up and running. Residential projects, by their nature, are much more complex because they involve dealing with individuals as well as all of us here, and trying to satisfy a market need that is both social and affordable. We did not mention that here but it is very important.

The two issues on planning and development in the delivery process are the planning mix and the tenure. I refer to who is going to own the end product. We are all of the time trying to work to that. There is also a constraint in regard to what can be financed. Those are competing issues. The NDFA has set out a process and that is starting to work and deliver now from a standing start. The private sector also has a part to play here. In some of those initiatives, such as Kilcarbery and those undertaken by other local authorities, the local authorities themselves have upskilled. They now have the necessary people in place to deliver on those initiatives. As someone who has been doing this for about 25 years, we need to look beyond the immediate issue. It is an important issue and all of the evidence is there to support the fact that we need to address it. We do, however, also need to think beyond that so that we do not get caught in this scenario again.

Since 2011 or 2012, the Society of Chartered Surveyors of Ireland has been trying to promote some kind of an entity that would act like, for example, the Dublin Docklands Development Authority, originally the Custom House Docks Development Authority. I refer to some entity on a national scale that would keep an eye on the future in respect of what should happen with its remit. The remit for the Dublin Docklands Development Authority was the redevelopment of the docklands area. It had a bad experience near the end of its shelf life but it was quite good up to then. We need something similar at this stage and we welcome the Land Development Agency. We have not seen fully what its remit is. I am talking about anything, however, that can add to the knowledge base, strategically pick out sites that need to be delivered, remove the planning issues around that - those that private sector will not or cannot take the risk on - and deliver on infrastructure such as sewerage, power and all of those things.

I refer to having sites shovel-ready so that when the private sector comes, and that will either be through the National Development Finance Agency, NDFA, process as outlined or through some other process, they have been de-risked. It would also be important that an eye be kept on the use mix because the type of mix is important. Our experience in projects in which we have been involved, which we will not mention here, includes seeing projects 15 to 20 years ago that did not even make the headlines. They started out with the best of intent by local authorities. We went through the process, we lived it and we all thought that we did the right thing. Last week, or the week before, I drove by one and brought kids in around it. I told them that we all thought we were going to do something great there but that it had not worked out. Those are the lessons to be learned. That kind of corporate knowledge needs to be provided to something like the Land Development Agency - I just picked that as an example - so that it can be handed down.

The second part of the point is the anti-cyclical aspect. Much of finance is based on there being some kind of consistent profit or return to pay for the input. A consistent level of output, therefore, is needed to provide the housing in the locations where it is needed. This goes back to the NDFA's point as well. It takes a long time to put these skill sets in place and, when they are in place, there should be encouragement to perform. They should be analysed and brought in front of committees like this regularly to see how they are performing. They should also be tweaked as needs be, but only in a small way and over a long duration because the arc of delivery on housing is ten, 15 or 20 years. We believe strongly that a forward plan is needed and that it needs to be supported.