Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)

I will be quick. I have one quick comment and then a quick question. To throw a different perspective into the debate about apartments, the assumption is that apartments have to be private rental sector. The difficulty of course is that a third of the people who live in the private rental sector should be in social housing. That is what they want, and we are paying a huge amount of money subsidising them to be in the private rental sector. We could significantly reduce pressure on PRS by dramatically increasing social housing and giving people a pathway. I know it is not the proposition from the presenters but if the proposition is we remove or lessen protections on new rental stock beyond the first rent, those investors will want to maintain those yields over the future. Dr. Kelly said it himself. They want those rents to effectively be guaranteed rises. That means you will get a very limited amount of investment and a very high rent. Therefore, the big missing piece of the apartment picture is affordable rental and affordable purchase. If the State is the investor in affordable rental, full cost recovery can be stretched over a much longer time. The State can handle that. Likewise, regarding affordable purchase, the State can absorb some of those costs. We need to broaden the conversation. I am only saying this because the witnesses are commentators on these things regularly.

We need more apartments. We need more high density development. The private sector today, no matter what level of subsidy is provided, cannot provide large volumes of good quality apartments at a range of prices that a range of workers can afford. It is just simply not possible. Therefore, the conversation needs to move to asking, how do we scale up affordable purchase and affordable rental for people who want apartments at affordable prices? I think that is the missing bit of the picture.

The question is as follows. Almost everybody has kind of agreed on structural demand. The Central Bank, the ESRI, the Government and the Housing Commission all reckon the mid-range scenario for emerging housing demand is in and around 44,000 units a year. The ESRI has not done an assessment of unmet demand. We have three assessments of unmet demand: at the high end, the Housing Commission, the Central Bank’s is lower than that and I am not sure whether the Government has an assessment of structural demand – it says it does but has yet to share it. Is there a problem that if we do not have an agreed or consensus on unmet demand, the new targets in the national planning framework will underestimate the level? If each year over the next number of years, as both organisations have said, we are not going to get to the average the Government wants anyway, the unmet demand will grow. Does that mean the way in which the NPF legislation - the Planning and Development Act - is set, where we are only going to review those HNDA targets within two years of every census, means we are already behind and we are going to be spending too much time to catch up? Would it not be better if we had an agreed methodology for determining unmet demand, pent-up demand and the deficit, revise the NPF if we need, and have more frequent periodic reviews of the NPF in terms of the good research done by the ESRI and others? I am worried the figure of an average of 50,000 units a year over the next five to six years is too low. It is lower than the witnesses’ and it is lower than the Housing Commission’s. Next year and the year after, because the deficit will grow, it will be even further behind, so we are kind of baking in a problem from the start. Do the witnesses share some of those concerns and how do we overcome them?