Ms Orla Hegarty:

To provide some context, there have been several rounds of changing regulations, particularly for apartment standards, since 2016. I have very serious concerns about the changes to the apartment standards. This is not just in terms of space being squeezed. It is also in terms of public health and safety. As an example, in the build-to-rent sector now a two-bedroom apartment has 20% less a volume than it would have had under the early regulations. This is a public health issue in terms of the pandemic, people's health and ventilation in buildings. We have also changed the standards whereby apartments are located down both sides of a single corridor in a hotel style. This means that cross-ventilation is no longer possible in the majority of apartments. Travel distances to fire escape stairs have been increased. Lobbies have been removed. Kitchens have been separated from central corridors and bedrooms. All of these cumulative changes have not been adequately assessed in terms of the longer-term implications.

In terms of the lightweight construction, there needs to be more of a balance. Policy is being driven by speed and cost, without really stepping back and saying that whatever we invest in housing now, and it will be considerable, has to be in housing that we will still have in 100 years' time and that will still be sustainable and usable in 100 years' time. Many of the decisions are being made on spreadsheets, almost as accountancy, on where costs can be shaved or where a week or two can be taken off the construction. We live in a climate that is very vulnerable to water ingress and deterioration of fabric. It is very damp. We are not used to denser housing in terms of fire safety. We have a poor record where we have had denser housing.

We are now moving to hyper-dense housing without balancing the requirements for it. In some cases we are moving to lighter construction, and I include timber-framed terraced housing in this, without an adequate assessment of whether we have robust enough quality controls to ensure that it is safe and well built. More broadly, in the rush to deliver numbers, perhaps sight is being lost of the main objective. Any new house built will have to stand for quite a long time and the mortgage relating to it will have to be paid back over a long period. We do not want to risk a situation where we are still paying for some of these houses when the buildings are no longer habitable.