Mr. Pat Doyle:

There is a lot there. I mentioned there are more than enough targets for all of us to live with. I have some concerns around communication to make sure local authorities and the LDA know exactly what we are doing and where we are doing it. We just need to make sure we do not take it for granted and that we keep the communication flow going both ways so that we are not all competing with each other. There are more than enough targets to deliver on in very challenging times.

The Irish Council for Social Housing has 50,000 members. We do a residents' survey every two years or so. The satisfaction rates are very high. Our speciality is in management. It is not who we manage but how we manage. We have specialties in managing clients for which some of the local authorities do not necessarily have the staffing or the resources to follow up on. There is 24-hour staff availability in some of the specialist approved housing bodies. There would be a fridge magnet on someone's fridge with the 24-hour numbers. If a person, or his or her neighbour, is in trouble, or someone is witnessing trouble, people can ring about estate management issues, maintenance issues, anti-social behaviour issues and so on. Some people ask why we need approved housing bodies and what is different about them. One of the hidden but very successful differences is that we estate manage very tightly. We have a very good satisfaction rating among our tenants and very few evictions. Some of us in the sector never evict at all. Some do if they feel it is necessary, but our eviction rate is very low. It is about how we manage and not who we manage.

The final question was around planning and tendering. That is a huge challenge. I would like to see the planning process pay more attention to what the need is rather than what the desire is in a particular local authority. A total of 55% of the people requiring a house on the social housing list require a one-bed or two-bed dwelling. We should be looking at more duplexes. We should be looking at more apartments that are lived in for life. We need lifetime apartments in which people have space and proper areas to put their bikes or their children's toys and so on rather than trying to squash families into apartments that are built really for people who live in them during the week and travel at the weekend or whatever. On the planning side, therefore, there is a disconnect at times between what the planners want, desire and demand and what the actual need is.

Anywhere State funding is being paid for social housing, it should be assessed against three criteria. I am not necessarily speaking for all members on this, though. The first is that housing applied for with State funding is in line with the typology of what we need to do, which is one-bed and two-bed dwellings for half of those. The second is whether duplexes have been considered on the land. The third is whether the housing has been poverty-proofed. Members probably have not heard that before but they do it in other jurisdictions. Has the housing been poverty-proofed? Some of the housing designs that are going in at the moment have windows from the top of the stairs to the bottom of the stairs. There is a cost of putting a blind on that. We see estates where developments have won awards for the designs but the tenants have sheets hanging up on the windows because it is cheaper. The windows are from floor to ceiling at the front of the building and people just cannot afford the blind. We provide that in many approved housing bodies but we do not in many council houses. We need to be assessing against the need, poverty-proofing and the typologies.

I cannot understand how the State pays so much for housing and does not demand more one-bed and two-bed dwellings within that. The State is paying for it. It should be making sure that what we are building is in line with what we need. Families who are homeless require four and five bedrooms. Traveller families who are on the housing lists require four and five bedrooms. We need to be smarter in the planning and criteria for drawing down State funding.