Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their contributions. I ask them not to take my comments personally. I know they are mandated in a particular way. I am one of the people who voted against the LDA to whom Deputy McAuliffe referred. I am very concerned about the announcement today and about particular elements of Mr. O'Rourke's opening statement in that he referred repeatedly to cost rental and affordable housing on public land. He made no reference to social housing other than previous work with approved housing bodies. This confirms my worst suspicion that Government policy, and not the LDA's agenda, is essentially that cost rental will replace differential rents and traditional council housing. This worries me.

Cost rental will be based on the costs of construction, if I understand it correctly although it has still not been fully fleshed out and anything the witnesses can say to flesh out further what it will mean in terms of rent would be helpful. Certainly in the examples I have seen so far the rents are far in excess of what they would be for a council house where it is linked to income. It is approximately 15% of income. The cost rental delivered on Enniskerry Road in my area is €1,200 a month. This is completely unaffordable for many individual workers in particular. I am very concerned. All of the lands identified in the appendix are public lands. There is a substitution effect, for want of a better phrase. Even if the agency is not, as others have referred to, grabbing land off the local authorities there is a substitution effect. We have been campaigning for 16 years to get public housing on the Shanganagh site and there still has not been a sod turned. Only some of it will be differential rent council housing, which is traditional council housing.

The rest of it will be cost rental. We do not know what that will be but it will be certainly be more expensive than traditional council housing. There will also be affordable housing. The key difference here is that the two latter categories, which the LDA mentions repeatedly, are linked in one way or another to market conditions. Mr. O’Rourke kind of made reference to that in his speech when he said we need strategies to deal with it. However, given construction cost inflation, do we not have a big reason to be concerned both about the LDA’s ability to deliver, given that it is outsourcing or tendering out, and about what the actual end cost will be and, consequently, the rents that will be charged? Is there not good reason to be concerned about those matters?

A co-operative housing project in Loughlinstown collapsed because the preferred tenderer said it could not deliver because of rising construction costs. It now has to be tendered out again. Our view, in that context, is that the strategy to deal with that is to have a State construction company. I would much rather if the LDA was a State construction company, which was not dependent on a difficult public procurement tendering process, when construction costs, as Mr. O’Rourke alluded to, are heading upwards and there is significant volatility in that area. I would like the witnesses to address that.

We are now looking at a mandate to take large swathes of public land and whereas previously, we would have delivered differential rent in traditional council housing, we will now have a regime of so-called affordability in which rents will be much higher than traditional council rents. As I said, there are also serious concerns about rising construction costs, the LDA’s vulnerability to market conditions and, ultimately, the vulnerability of either the renters or purchasers to rising costs. This is because the house price or, in the case of the cost-rental housing, the rents will be linked to market conditions in some shape or form. I would be interested to hear the LDA’s response to that.

Will the LDA explain the delay with the Shanganagh site? Why is there a delay? We were told the Shanganagh project would be on site by the end of 2021. It is still not on site. What is the delay? At what stage exactly is the project? Can we be sure that the covenant for 200 social, 200 cost-rental and 100 purchase homes will be rigorously maintained? Will social will mean "social" in the traditional sense of council housing, with rents of that type?

All the sites the LDA identifies in the schedule are public sites. It states it is also assembling privately-owned land that is not being developed but should be developed. Will it name those sites? How much work is being done in that area? That is a big area and I would prefer if the LDA was doing more of that and letting the local authorities develop public land. To what extent will the LDA go after private land that is being hoarded or sat on and should be developed for public and affordable housing?