Dr. Rory Hearne:

-----where there are different living arrangements. The broader point the Deputy is making is correct which is that we do need to consider how we are housing people.

The housing crisis is not one that has emerged out of nowhere and is not just the fault of this Government. It is as a result of 30 years of not thinking about housing and how we treat it and what role it has in the economy and essentially handing it over to the market. We need to understand again what role housing plays. Across the board there are so many groups affected. On the value for money issue and hard data, the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform did its own analysis of the housing assistance payment, HAP, and showed that in areas of high rental pressure that HAP is not good value for money in contrast to direct build. Leasing is not going to be very different from that, as I showed in the costings there.

It would be interesting the ask the Comptroller and Auditor General to come in and analyse these schemes because they did such analysis on schools and found that the schools were 8% to 13% more expensive. This office could look at the public sector benchmark while retaining the commercial sensibility on it. That is how they provide it.

I did analysis of the original 2006-08 public private partnership social housing regeneration projects. My analysis was that the State was giving developers essentially public land worth €545 million. In return the State was getting social housing and community facilities worth about €250 million. The developers in the private sector were capturing that value. The issue is that the State does not put a value on the land it has. The Department looks at social housing delivered through these various schemes as being Exchequer-neutral, not a cost, but that is not putting a proper value on the land, in my view.

The other issue on risk-sharing of all PPPs globally is that when risks and problems materialise in PPP projects, it is always the State that has to pay for that risk, because it is the State that is responsible to deliver whatever the service is. The private sector is aware of this and that is why they like these projects. They are guaranteed income, no matter what happens. It is important to see that the risk-sharing idea is a nonsense because in reality when risk materialises the State has to pay.

On a broader level on how we are responding, the question on the private market is a really good one. We have to see that our housing system, I would argue, has gone through this shock and is fundamentally changed. We now have a fifth of households in the private rental sector. I asked a class off 80 students last week how many of them thought they would own their own home. Approximately ten of them put up their hands. We have a generation who are going to be in the private rented sector. What we need to do is to change utterly how we see social housing. We need to re-imagine social housing and to change it to this idea of public affordable housing that is available, as in Denmark and Austria, to anybody on any income. If we separate the social and affordable housing issue we have this constant problem of all these different issues. I agree with Mr. Mc Manus, we need to see that it is not about tinkering around the edges. We need in Ireland to move to providing a third of housing coming from the non-market, not-for-profit sector to some form of social or public affordable housing, housing associations or co-operatives. Currently it is only 10%. The reality, to address Deputy Boyd Barrett's point, is that the private sector will build. It may build 30,000 units next year. We know it will get nowhere near that but it will not build affordable housing. That is the problem we have had over the past 30 years.

That is the change we need to make and it is a big change. That is the scale of the change that is required if we are going to address the crisis.