Mr. John Coleman:

I thank the Chairman for what is a very interesting question and one that we think about all of the time. What does the LDA have? It has access to capital but it is not unlimited, so it must be used wisely. It also has access to State land but again, that is not unlimited so the land must be used wisely. There is a real opportunity for us, with the LDA and the Bill, to be quite clever and look beyond the mere delivery of X-thousand homes or units in the near term and look at the strategic options available to the State. If we can use this nearer term opportunity with the LDA, its money and its sites, to create an affordable home sector, especially a cost-rental sector that is sustainable and capable of covering its costs, that could be amplified and applied more broadly. That is the real opportunity here, to prove that we can create a sustainable, replicable and scalable cost-rental sector and that is what we should focus on as a medium-term objective. I know this is something the Government and other agencies involved in housing delivery are also very much focused on. That is the opportunity. A medium-term strategy for the LDA to get up to a certain number, X thousand, of homes in that sector could prove the cost-rental sector to ethical investors who might want to invest in it in the near term.

I hasten to add that we are more focused on the deployment of the Land Development Agency's capital to deliver our homes rather than investment at this point. It is probably desirable over the longer term to attract that very cheap ethical-type finance, including pension funds. These are the type of investors we want to see that are not fly-by-nights and will stay for 25 years or longer. As a medium-term objective, that is desirable.

On the question of what cost rental looks like, we can look to other jurisdictions and it would be desirable to replicate the Vienna model in Ireland over the very long term. That gives us some clues, although they have been doing this since the end of the Second World War. It takes a long time to achieve a scale that they have. There are other clues. If we look at regulated affordable rental home providers in Germany, for example, some have average tenancies of 13 years. These are people who could really set down roots in affordable rental or cost rental homes, as we call it, with sustainable and non-transient communities building up as a result. That would deal with many of the concerns people have about rental housing in this country. There is potential transience, with people in a unit for six months or a year, for example.

I envisage open-ended leases and putting in measures to encourage people to stay and make the place their own rather than providing for a high turnover of occupants. If we can provide it, people will buy into that.