Ms Camille Loftus:

I thank the Senator for his very kind comments. The Housing Alliance takes some degree of pride in running a tight ship and in providing good quality homes for people for as long as they need them or for their lifetimes. The viability of developing these homes rests very strongly on being able to get access to land. If one talks to the larger developers and the larger AHBs, they will all say that the bulk of this is developed on publicly owned land that is transferred for no or low-cost from the local authority. Obviously, the local authorities also have targets to meet over the next number of years, so there is going to be pressure on that collective resource. Eventually, we will have built on all of the public land that we own. The point we are trying to make in our submission is that we actually need a long-run system in place. We need somebody with the responsibility whose job it is to ensure that there is a sustainable supply of land in order to develop housing so we are not constantly finding ourselves in a boom-bust cycle with too many homes or too few homes. There are many ways of doing that and one of the things we want to flag is that there are a lot of players in the housing market at the moment. If we are all charged with going out and running around to acquire additional land, there is a risk that Sean will be bidding against Frank will be bidding against Sharon who will be bidding against somebody in the LDA, and the only person who will benefit from that is the landowner.

From our perspective, there is merit in the State trying to master plan and land bank for the future so there is a source of land available. It should be able to say that land will require water supplied to, or electricity and gas, etc., and will need servicing with roads. That will leave us ahead of the game and not trying to respond to crises as we go along.