Mr. John O'Connor:

Deputy Boyd Barrett asked what percentage of housing should be public. At the moment it is somewhere in the order of 10%.

We definitely need to be moving towards having 25% of the 40% in public housing. In the Netherlands, Denmark and Austria, for example, which I mentioned have reasonably successful housing systems, public housing or not-for-profit housing accounts for approximately 50% of their overall housing. We undoubtedly need to be moving up to a higher percentage than we are at present and that needs to be one of our objectives for the future.

In terms of housing, we were asked whether supply is the issue. We definitely need more housing supplied but it is a question of what type of housing and for whom. One must not over-rely on the private market to supply that. It needs the private market but also the supply of affordable rental housing for a wide cohort of people.

In terms of getting the supply going, the issue we must address is building on scale. On the public housing side, we are trying to deliver small sites and that will not give us the delivery we need. We need to deliver on a much bigger scale on those publicly controlled sites and maybe not get too hung up on stating that we must have houses for sale, we must have this and we must have that. We need to provide effectively a lot of rental housing on those sites.

One point I would ask the committee to consider is the balance between home ownership and rental housing. There needs to be both. There needs to be home ownership and there needs to be rental housing. Often policies and initiatives are focused on home ownership and we do not get the balance right. There needs to be rental housing. We need to provide rental housing that is both affordable and for which one has long-term security of tenure. That is one critical aspect.

The other point about rental housing - we have seen it in the private sector - is that one can get pension funds or investors to fund rental accommodation because they know a whole development can be funded and delivered. When one gets into housing for sale, one is waiting for somebody to buy it. The same can be applied to the State-owned or local authority-owned land. Let us build rental housing for a wide cohort of households at scale.

On that issue of income thresholds, over time we need to address that issue, in that anyone should be able to avail of public housing. I am not saying we can just replicate those other countries. We must see how they do it and how can it be applied here. We are probably the only country that has income thresholds on eligibility for social housing and it is something that needs to be looked at. Various changes need to be made to effect that.

Deputy Ellis asked who delivers it and whether there are local authority companies elsewhere. In terms of how it is delivered elsewhere, it is local authority companies. They call them municipal companies in other countries because they are municipal authorities. There is also the not-for-profit sector of housing associations. It tends to be a combination of the two. Some countries favour one over the other. Sweden might have many municipal housing companies delivering that, whereas the likes of the Netherlands has many housing associations.

On HAP, the balance has to be got right. HAP has its place in terms of meeting housing needs but we need to get the balance right. We still need to be delivering enough public housing in the State. I will list some of the advantages of HAP. It meets people's immediate need. If somebody is on the housing list and he or she needs to get rental accommodation and is eligible for social housing, that person can now avail of HAP. I take the point that it is difficult in certain areas to find rental accommodation. HAP encourages people to take up employment and there are not the restrictions that have been mentioned, as in rent supplement, in taking up full-time employment. An important advantage of HAP, even over traditional social housing, is that if one gets a job in a different county, one can move and stay on HAP. One advantage of HAP over other measures is that ability to move for certain households. If a person is in Dublin and gets a job in Meath, he or she can move to Meath and get a HAP property in Meath. It has only been teased out in the past year to make that more effective. It also allows for some households which are not being allocated social housing to avail of rental housing. Therefore, there are advantages.

There is a balance. We need more publicly owned property - be it local authorities or the housing associations providing and owning more rental housing. There is no question about that. It is a matter of trying to get the balance right.

On the delivery, there are constraints. There are the funding constraints. We talk about having capital funding, having current expenditure funding and within the European Union, there are controls on the balance sheet treatment of this. We must fund and deliver housing within those constraints of the capital available, the current expenditure available but also the balance sheet treatment of that. It can be done. In some cases, we might need to change how we use the funding because sometimes we merely continue on with our old ways of doing it. There is the availability of low-cost finance, particularly with the State and long-term proposals.

I will finish with Deputy Ellis's point. There are large tracts of land and the State or local authorities need to develop the ones that are in their control, and do it on scale to meet the housing needs.