John Cummins (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I confirm I am in the Leinster House complex. I welcome Mr. O'Connor, Dr. O'Toole , Dr. O'Connell, Mr. Cahill and their colleagues to this meeting. My first question is in regard to Dr. O'Toole's concluding remark in his opening statement that credit market supports such as the shared equity scheme and other interventions may indeed lower credit constraints by facilitating home purchase for buyers who otherwise would have been unable to enter the market. In my book, that is a positive. We all know constituents and other people who are paying exceptionally high rents and whose incomes are such that they cannot get a sufficient mortgage but, if they could, their repayments would be substantially lower than the rents they are paying. These are the people that we are trying to cater for in the affordable housing Bill. It is important to say that.

I put it to Dr. O'Toole that, as mentioned earlier by Deputy McAuliffe, he has ignored a significant part of the Bill, namely, the provision of affordable purchase homes on local authority lands. That is ultimately a large supply measure that will impact the provision of homes. I take it from Dr. O'Toole's thesis that he disagrees fundamentally with the Department's contribution to the committee last week by Mr. Barry Quinlan and Mr. Robert Nicholson that, according to the UK National Audit Office, which is the equivalent of our Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General, the equity-based scheme in the UK had led to a 14.5% increase in supply and a 1% increase on a like-for-like basis in house prices. Dr. O'Toole says that supply is important. I put it to him that this is a supply-based measure.