Cian O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

This is the point that I am trying to make. What the councillors will do in their housing strategies is they will say they need enough land for, let us say, 10,000 affordable homes in their area over the next ten years, some of which will be affordable rental or cost-rental and affordable purchase, but then what happens? It is fine to have a housing strategy and say this is their assessment of housing need but then what happens? How do they make sure that the land is available at affordable prices for affordable housing? They have no tool, under the legislation, to do it without this amendment. If this amendment was accepted, or if the Minister of State provided his own form of words for it, councillors could introduce an affordable housing zoning and they would be able to take a practical step to ensure enough land was available at low affordable prices for affordable housing. That is the issue.

Having the housing strategy and being able to say this is what our needs are and this is what our ambition is but not having the tools to actually implement that in their development plan is a problem and that is what this amendment seeks to support. It is done in Vienna and I will give one example of where this would have been very useful. Councillors on Dublin City Council a few years ago were approached by the landowner of the Chivers site in Coolock. The landowner said: "If the land is rezoned to allow residential housing, I will put forward lots of affordable housing in it." The councillors rezoned the land to residential but the landowner then said he or she could no longer provide affordable housing and sold on the site to a third party and flipped it with a substantial uplift in value having got the land rezoned, and now there is no commitment or obligation whatsoever to provide anything over and above in terms of affordable housing. If the councillors had been able to say, "Great, you want to provide affordable housing here and it is an industrial zone but we will put an affordable housing zoning on it," we would not have this problem and the land would not have been flipped on at the full market price. It would have instead been sold on at a reduced rate because the housing that was going to be provided would have been available at a reduced rate. It makes absolute sense to capture that uplift in land value. Such an initiative works very well in other countries. With respect, this Government's Housing for All policy is not meeting its affordable housing targets and has been way off them every year. Clearly when the Opposition put forward constructive proposals on this to give the Government the tools to put more affordable housing in place, it should take them.