Rebecca Moynihan (Labour) | Oireachtas source

There is a little bit of déjà vuwith this. In 2016, when the housing crisis was becoming very apparent, industry representatives lobbied and said they would not be able to deliver housing until, for example, minimum standards were revised and guidelines came from the Department which provided for co-living, build to rent, and student accommodation. Yet we are still sitting here six years later and - this may be the first year - we are seeing an increase in planning permission applications. There have been an awful lot of applications but no commencements or completions. I always take it with a pinch of salt when I hear "unviability" being thrown around by industry representatives.

I want to get a sense of the difference in construction costs for apartments and suburban houses, because many of the figures quoted today relate to suburban houses. The national planning framework has a target of 14% compact growth where there is access to services, transport and water, which are already there on serviced sites. It was interesting to hear that we may need more zoned land made available. One of the mistakes we made was that we zoned land in areas that were not connected to services.

When I was a member of Dublin City Council, we were told in 2016 that, in order to be able to deliver affordable housing on the Chivers industrial site, we would have to rezone the land. At that stage, it was worth €2.55 million. We never saw the affordable housing on which basis we zoned that land. Instead, we saw the site being sold for €25 million in 2021.

There is a big problem in construction with what are referred to as soft costs, which are what remain after the hard costs are stripped out. In a very good report produced by the Society of Chartered Surveyors, soft costs are put at approximately €30,000 per unit. The society might not have the information with it now, but I would like to see a comparison between the soft costs for apartments and houses in urban areas. I understand that the witnesses might nor have this separated information. By “soft costs”, I am referring to VAT, other taxes, levies, professional fees, margins and so on. Stripping out taxes, given that development levies exist in order to provide infrastructural projects that eventually benefit developers and homeowners, which soft costs could national action be taken on now to reduce costs? I would like an overview of land costs and the witnesses’ views on why those are so high.