Dr. Conor O'Toole:

It was not our aim or intention, with that particular report, to come out in favour of either homeownership or the rental sector. Rather, the research intended to take the proportions in the different tenures and try to scope out what the impact would be of various scenarios around that transition on income adequacy. In a sense, when we are thinking about the income adequacy in retirement aspect, which was the end of aim of that research, we have to come at it from two sides. One is to ask what is going to happen to those who remain in the rental sector. We expect that it will be a higher proportion of people than historically. Certainly, our position is that the development of tenures such as the expansion of the cost rental programme is a positive development. That is happening and we are very supportive of it. It is currently ramping up over time. We see that as quite a positive development, in particular, where the rate of inflation in the cost rents over time is less that the inflation rate of incomes. That should give households breathing space when they come to that income cliff, because those cost rents are not set my market prices. On the rental side, we see the building up of a structural change in the rental tenure provision towards more cost-rental-type arrangements as a hugely promising element.

On the homeownership side, there is a very delicate balance to strike. Naturally, many of the measures that we have been talking about for numerous years around increasing the supply of new homes, such as active land management through the Land Development Agency and other measures that can increase the supply of homes for purchase at affordable rates, are very welcome. There are also demand-side levers that can be used but that can be problematic, given some of the consequences involved. In a sense, the research tried to take a broad perspective. It was not about taking a position on whether renting was necessarily a good thing rather than homeownership. It was just trying to map out, with a series of scenarios, what the implications will be and how that links to the current structure of the pension system, which in a sense has leveraged what we call a double dividend of high homeownership rate, given that wealth and that protection against the income fall by lowering the housing cost.