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

I thank the Chair. Amendment No. 906 is standalone, and inserts, on page 405, the following wording:

A Housing Strategy shall include—

(a) an estimate of the amount of land that the local authority will need to acquire through compulsory purchase orders or other means to meet future housing needs as estimated in the housing strategy and to ensure that land is available at affordable prices for housing development of all tenures and types, and

(b) targets and timelines for the acquisition of land to meet housing need as identified in the housing strategy.”.

This amendment is, in effect, to give effect to the Kenny report that was published more than 50 years ago. If the recommendations of the Kenny report had been implemented more than 50 years ago, we would not be in the situation we are in with the current housing crisis. What the amendment seeks to do is to not just identify in the housing strategy what housing is needed but for the local authority to be proactive in assembling the land required to meet those housing needs.

Section 377 of the Bill, which is on land acquisition, allows local authorities to CPO land to give effect to or facilitate the implementation of its development plan or housing strategy, so it is a very good section of the Bill. However, without there being an obligation on the local authority to identify the housing strategy and how much land is needed, and without it setting out targets and timelines for acquiring that land to meet housing need as identified in the housing strategy, we are not going to get implementation of the Kenny report as I think we need. In effect, what happens is the current situation where you will have the housing strategy identifying what is needed, and then you will have zonings and plans around it but it will effectively be up to the private market then to assemble the land and so forth.

I do not need to talk about the effects of the housing crisis but, with regard to leaving it to the private market to assemble the amount of land needed to ensure it is available at affordable prices for housing that is affordable, it is blatantly clear that is not happening. It has resulted in record numbers of people who are homeless and a huge amount of hardship, grief and stress for people.

I want to reference a couple of things on this. The ESRI, for example, has called for tighter regulation of the land market, and that it is needed to bring down house prices. Of course, this has not been done by the Government. There were comments published just over the weekend by the head of property and land development at the Land Development Agency saying that many private landowners are sitting on overpriced sites with unimplementable planning permissions. If we do not tackle the issue of land assembly, and tackle it on scale, we are not going to the level of affordable housing delivery that is needed.

Some think the Kenny report is some sort of massively radical plan that could not be implemented here. Of course, there has been work done since on constitutionality, etc., and there was the all-party Oireachtas group, which must be the best part of 20 years ago at this point, that recommended that the Kenny report be implemented, with a majority view that it was constitutional and so forth. However, this level of land assembly is standard practice in some other European countries. If you take the Netherlands, for example, local authorities are actively involved in assembling land and ensuring there is a continuous supply of land for all different types of housing. When you look at Germany, for example, local authorities have been very active in acquiring land and making it available for development. These are countries where the housing situation is significantly better than ours in terms of affordability.

Then, if you look at the programme for Government agreed between three parties, it commits to the Vienna model of housing. Of course, what do they do in Vienna? The municipality assembles land, buys it or CPOs it as agricultural land, effectively changes the zoning, and puts in all the services. We are talking Kenny report, except they have been doing that for the best part of 100 years in Vienna. If we had done this about 50 years ago when it was recommended in the Kenny report, we would not be in this situation. Housing is much more affordable in Vienna than it is in Ireland, on any proportionality basis that you look at.

If you look at land costs and how this is affecting housing affordability, the SCSI report estimates that land acquisition costs, in terms of any housing unit built, are at about 15%. Land costs are significantly more than that when you apportion margin and finance costs to it. That is, if you were to remove the 15% cost, you would actually make an affordability gain beyond 15% because it is not just the 15% handed over. There are the margin, risk and financing costs that apply to that 15%.

To give some examples in terms of land assembly costs, if we look at Marino, which was built as affordable-purchase housing 100 years ago, the land costs there were less than 4% of the unit cost for the delivery of a house. The land for the first phase of the Marino housing scheme, some 231 houses, was purchased at a cost of £4,794, which worked out at little more than £20 per house. The houses themselves were completed for £589 each.

If we turn then to look at what is happening with land acquisition now, the Housing Agency, for example, has given figures for the land acquisition fund. It bought a site in Rathbeale in Swords for €20 million for 500 affordable homes, which works out at a cost of €40,000 per home in terms of land acquisition costs. Media reports concerning a site in Malahide, with planning permission for 47 homes, referred to it being sold on the private market. The site cost per home was €186,000. This is certainly at the upper end of things, but it shows some of the major problems we have in this area.

There is a strong and compelling case, therefore, for the State and local authorities to get involved in land acquisition. Not getting involved in land acquisition, as has been done successfully in other countries, has left this process to the private market and to speculation, which means there is a massive uplift and gain when someone buys up land and gets it rezoned. Very large windfalls are made from doing this. We spoke previously about issues in the Bill concerning public areas and amenities in new developments not being taken in charge, the delays in this regard and how these can go on for decades. Unfortunately, this is an area on which the Government has not accepted my amendments.

If the Minister of State were to accept this amendment, however, I could forgive him for not accepting my taking-in-charge amendments because we would not then have this problem. The local authority would buy up the land, and it could then put in the roads, footpaths and parks and sell on plots of land, some of which could be used for affordable housing and some for social housing, with some going to not-for-profit entities. The local authorities, in this approach, could then sell on plots to small builders or whomever. The plots will have been bought via a compulsory purchase order at existing-use land value, as is allowed under section 377 of the Bill concerning land acquisition. A margin can then be applied to the land and site costs to pay for the infrastructure needed for the paths, roads, parks, community facilities and so forth.

This would mean we would not need a taking-in-charge process because the infrastructure would be built before there are even any homes constructed, which, of course, is done in some countries. Imagine having this infrastructure in place before the houses are built, instead of our approach now, when some of the infrastructure and community facilities come in after kids that were not even born when their parents moved into a development have moved out having reached their 20s or 30s. This is the current situation. Quite frankly, it is outrageous. I, therefore, urge that this amendment be accepted, so we can just get on with providing a sufficient amount of land at affordable houses to allow us to have the affordable houses we need in well-planned communities with the requisite infrastructure and facilities in place up front, as was recommended more than 50 years ago in the Kenny report.