Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I am not interested in making political or other charges for the sake of it. Rather, I am interested in getting to the facts. I am aware there are many different streams, but that does not answer the question I asked. What is the real addition to the local authority housing stock? The Minister has an obligation to tell us that. I acknowledge that that is only one stream. The NOAC report indicates that the additional local authority housing stock for 2017 was 2,019 and that 564 homes were added to the stock in Dublin. That is substantially less than the additional stock suggested by the figures for 2017 presented by the Minister specifically in regard to local authorities.

I would like an answer to that question. When stock is demolished and then rebuilt, if what is built is less than what was demolished, there is a net reduction. Crucially, the big issue is voids, the way they are defined long term versus short term and that what are, in effect, casual vacancies are being counted as additional stock. That is my explanation, but there is definitely a discrepancy in the figures. The Minister might not be able to answer that question now but I would like an answer to it as it is an important issue.

The Minister gave some additional figures for HAP, namely 13,741 tenancies at the end of quarter 3. Could he tell us, and these should be included in all the figures, how many landlords pulled out of the HAP scheme in the same period? We need to know how secure or insecure HAP tenancies are because certainly, anecdotally, we meet many people who find themselves back in emergency accommodation or back in trouble even though they got a HAP tenancy previously.

On the issue of affordability, the Minister did not answer my question. The biggest residential development in the State is not unimportant. We are being told €400,000 is just the figure it costs to build by the developer. I do not see how that really helps us resolve the problem. The Minister can say the answer is supply but supply at that price does not help. The prices are not coming down. I met young people who were living in the Ires Reit units in Sandyford where Ires Reit tried to put up the rent by about 40%. The rents were already €2,200 a month for those units and it tried to put them up to €2,800 but it stopped because of the embarrassment of the issue being raised. When I talked to the people living in those units, I heard there were five or six students or five or six IT employees working in Sandyford piled in together in a unit paying rents they could barely afford. What will happen in five years' time to those people when they have children and families? They can just about afford that level of rent if five or six people pile in together. There will be similar rents in the units in Cherrywood if they are buy-to-rent, but in five or six years' time those units will be useless for those people. The problem is one of affordability. Even on the affordable base we are going to get, it is not clear in Cherrywood, in terms of the local infrastructure housing activation fund, LIHAF for all the structures that we paid to put in place in terms of the infrastructure, how much actual affordable housing we will get and what affordable price we will be given, taking account of the extremely high price about which they are talking.

Regarding the impact of raising building heights, Deputy Ó Broin referred to this issue in terms of land values and so on. Has the Minister considered that by raising building heights there is the possibility that people who already have planning permissions will pull them and apply for new ones, thereby slowing down delivery because they will be able to build an extra few storeys? That is very likely to happen. Has the Minister considered the impact of that? We know there is considerable hoarding and speculating. It is very likely that raising building heights will be a trigger for that kind of activity.