Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their presentations. I acknowledge the significant body of research NESC and the ESRI have been doing on land and housing. The committee has been paying close attention to it. As a small aside, as new research papers are produced it is always welcome if they are sent directly to the committee secretariat to circulate to us in case we miss some of the publication dates.

I have a list of questions for both organisations and I will go through them quickly. The heads of the land development agency Bill do not include compulsory purchase order, CPO, powers. Particularly with respect to NESC's view in its 2018 report that enhanced CPO powers are very important, I would like to hear the views of the witnesses on the types of CPO powers they believe an effective land management agency would need and how much would it be hampered if it did not have CPO powers.

I also want to raise the issue of the Kenny report because it is something that is spoken about as often as it is ignored. Much of the time when people speak about it they do not seem to have a full appreciation of what it proposed. There is a very good summary of it in NESC's 2018 report. The Kenny report recommended that subject to High Court approval a compulsory purchase order price would be set at the agricultural value of the land plus 25%. The working assumption at that point was that the people who owned the land would have paid agricultural prices for it and, therefore, would get compensated for the money they paid plus extra. The difficulty with applying a similar scheme today is that it is highly unlikely that the people from whom the land would be purchased bought at agricultural prices. Given the constitutional issues not so much about property rights but about fair compensation, which is the real issue, how do the witnesses see a modern-day application of a similar scheme that would get us around the compensation issue? Otherwise we would end up having to buy sites at the value paid for them, which could be very excessive.

I am also interested in the views of NESC on brownfield sites. We used to talk about agricultural sites but much of what the Land Development Agency will be doing will be looking at brownfield or industrial estates.

A big concern for many of us in terms of how the Land Development Agency has been set up is affordability and the huge impact of land prices on affordable rents and purchases. In Poppintree with Ó Cualann, Dublin City Council extracted the land value completely out of the equation. By doing this, we can deliver eminently affordable houses. However, in O'Devaney Gardens it appears private developers are being allowed to extract the market value of the land despite the fact they are not paying for it. How do we ensure that when the private sector is involved there is not land value extraction that pushes up the price of those properties?

Transparency was a big issue of concern for the committee when the Department appeared before us last week, with regard to the Land Development Agency not being subject to freedom of information for most of its dealings. NESC spoke about a highly skilled and respected public agency. The worry many of us have, and this is absolutely no disrespect to any of the people employed at present by the Land Development Agency, is that if it does not have transparency and accountability how can we guarantee it will have that public respect? Are the witnesses concerned there are limitations on the extent of accountability and transparency?

My next question, on house price volatility, is more for the ESRI. Many of the reports that have been produced have looked at demand and supply issues. They have looked at the demand for housing versus the supply of housing and the demand and supply of land. What many people have not focused on is the impact of credit liberalisation and the growing volumes of credit, particularly after the crash, and quantitative easing into land as a secure and stable investment. What are the witnesses' thoughts on this? Do we also need to be thinking about how we constrain not credit supply but speculative credit supply as part of our considerations on this?

The 2018 NESC report included a very interesting chapter on locational value mechanisms. Will the witnesses summarise and give us an idiots guide to this? It is one part of the report I did not fully understand but I believe it is relevant to what we are doing.

There is a discussion on the difference between agricultural and residential prices. Will the witnesses flesh this out a little more? Do they have any observations on where that gap is at present, particularly in high demand and high cost housing areas such as Dublin?