Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate the bona fides of Deputy Boyd Barret's contribution but I wish to clarify what I just said because the Deputy is conflating the term "affordability" in two different Bills. Affordability is set out in the Affordable Housing Bill to allow councils to build homes on public land and the LDA will do the same. That is dealt with in the Affordable Housing Bill. In this Bill, the affordability percentage is a mechanism which is being used to devalue land that has a commercial or market value. The land currently has a market value and we are applying an affordability percentage to that land and as a result, because it is below the market value and the costs of construction are there, the land effectively has no tradeable, real market value on the open market. Therefore, we are eliminating the land costs and that is what the Bill is doing. It is not a neat or pretty way of doing it but because we want it to develop and because we want to comply with EU state aid rules, we are doing that so that the land cost is eliminated from the overall cost when the LDA or the councils take up the obligation to build affordable housing. What we are doing here is making sure that the land cost is eliminated. That is done by applying the affordability percentage. The land already has a market value and therefore, when we refer to market value in the Bill, we are naming its existing value. It is clear that when we talk about market value, we are naming the current value of the land; it has a value. When we talk about affordability, we are talking about a mechanism to reduce the land costs because we do not want the land to be traded openly on the open market, regardless of who owns it. The mechanism will eliminate the cost of land in the development of housing by the LDA, the councils and others.