Pat Casey (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Department and the LDA for the presentations. How we manage our land and affordability is critical. As such, I welcome the establishment of the LDA, albeit I have some questions about the establishment process and how oversight will be carried out. I will start on the oversight issue. It concerns the oversight of the LDA and, subsequently, any subsidiary of it. When I was newly elected to the Oireachtas three years ago, it came as a bit of shock to find that I was not allowed to ask questions about Irish Water. Will I be able to submit parliamentary questions about the operation of the Land Development Agency? Are there parts of it that I will be excluded from asking about in respect of oversight? Will it stretch to subsidiaries of the LDA also?

When we talk about affordability, land cost is an issue. I noted Ms Graham saying all State land would be transferred at market value. Once we keep using market value for land, achieving affordability becomes very difficult. As we are all aware at this stage, regulation is the same across the country. Building material, labour and finance costs might vary slightly, depending on the higher risk in rural areas, but the fundamental key to achieving affordability is the cost of land. When we transfer State land to another State body at market value, I do not know how we can achieve affordability. I mean that genuinely. We have mentioned the national development plan and the ramping up of compact growth. We are also ramping up densities. We are, in fact, ramping up the market value of land. All of our development plans nationally have perhaps one full cycle of six years and perhaps another half cycle for land zoned. This has ramped up the value to a greater extent.

If we are buying all of it at market value, I question how we will ever get to the level of affordability.

We have had representatives of the Department, local authorities and approved bodies before us and today we have officials from the Land Development Agency. Only last week we had the Minister before us, while the proposal in the budget last year was to allow local government a cap of €6 million with which it could deliver housing. The Minister said that would not happen as we needed oversight. He said local authorities should go through the 59-week, four-stage process and that he would not give those powers to them because they did not have the ability to deliver. We are handing €1.25 billion to the Land Development Agency. Does it have a four-stage, 59-week process? If a local authority skips the Department because the process is too complicated and goes straight to the Land Development Agency, will it get through it much more quickly?

How we deliver housing in the future will be more complex because of the introduction of the Land Development Agency, especially as it tries to deliver 150,000 houses over 20 years. That works out at 7,500 houses per year. How many of them will be delivered through the local authorities or privately on public or State lands? I might come back in later on that issue.

The off-balance sheet position and the commercial basis of this body are of interest because we have just gone through two sessions discussing how and why approved housing bodies have been moved from being off-balance sheet to being on-balance sheet. The delegates said with near certainty that the Land Development Agency process will be off-balance sheet, but perhaps that is not the case. In our interactions with the approved housing bodies, the Department of Finance and the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government it was clear that it was not just the capital aspect that made the process on-balance sheet but rather the control of the local authority. There was the differential rent aspect, allocation and design criteria, which had led to the Central Statistics Office and EUROSTAT indicating that all it was on-balance sheet.

Who is dictating the allocation of all social and affordable housing related to the Land Development Agency? Is it the agency or the local authorities?

They are a few initial questions, but I might come back in again in the second round as I have certain concerns about oversight. I am disappointed by the 60:40 split that was mentioned, as is everybody here. Is it worth considering it within primary legislation and putting a figure on it?