Ms Fiona Cormican:

One of the solutions to all of this is a focus on mixed tenure schemes, or tenure blind schemes as we can call them. Mr. Hannigan mentioned earlier that our focus should be on mixed tenure schemes. When I speak of mixed tenure schemes, I mean truly mixed tenure, where we work with developers to deliver private, social, affordable, cost rental, older persons’ and special needs housing, all in the same scheme. One of the ways to make the schemes affordable and to ensure we have the proper facilities in place is to use the developer’s profits on the private homes to help to cross-subsidise the communal spaces etc. However, funding should also be available to us to ensure we contribute our share to those spaces as well.

For example, I will go back to the issue of the 100% debt funding. All our schemes are 100% debt funded, whereas the local authorities have access to the affordable housing fund or to capital grants. The Land Development Agency, LDA, itself, has a significant fund made available to it. The only organisations that are being asked to deliver housing on 100% debt finance are the approved housing bodies, which are charities. It is difficult to get 100% debt finance for social areas, parks, playgrounds etc. Therefore, our only way of doing it at the moment is to work closely with developers to try to cross-subside those areas through their sale of private housing.