Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will finish on that point, because I do not agree. I do not believe it is reasonable and I do not believe that Mr. Hogan privately thinks it is reasonable either, but that is just my own view. The Housing Commission is telling us that over the same period, we need an average of at least 60,000 homes. If 50,000 was reasonable over the Department's trajectory, we would be under-delivering by 100,000 homes or more over that decade. Mr. Hogan is saying it is a reasonable allowance. It is fewer than half of the lowest scenario that has been set out by the Housing Commission. I will tease this out in the submission, but given that one of the fundamental weaknesses of the original national planning framework, which then fed into one of the fundamental weaknesses of the Government’s housing plan, namely, an underestimation of housing need, we are again starting from the wrong position.

My view, although I am not asking Mr. Hogan to comment on this, is that this is a political number. It is not based on any evidence or empirical assessment. Nobody has picked a figure of 6,000 additional units on top of structural demand. It is interesting, when reading the reports of the ESRI and the Housing Commission, that their figures for structural housing demand are almost exactly the same. When we look at the mid-range in the Housing Commission’s report, it has taken the underlying structural demand from the previous ESRI report and added a little to it. The ESRI's report of last week has done something similar. It is about the pent-up demand, and the idea we will need just an additional 6,000 units a year, when it could be anything from 15,000 to 25,000 in addition, is a big problem but I will leave that to one side.

The next issue will be helpful for the committee. I presume that in preparing the document that was published yesterday, there was an assessment of which objectives, as set out in the original NPF, were met, partially met and not met. Did the Department conduct that exercise following the publication of the expert review group's report of last year, and if so, can that be shared with the committee? It would be interesting to know what did and did not work. Compact growth, for example, clearly did not work. If we look at what is being built in, say, the greater Dublin area, almost everything is outside of the M50 or on the commuter belt, rather than inside the urban core.

Typically, it is still low-rise, low-density or mid-rise, low-density. Is there an assessment of what did and did not work that can be shared with the committee?