Mr. Ivailo Kalfin:

Housing is very much a national issue because there are distinct national policies on housing. In recent years, because it goes across the board in every member state, it has gone to European level. Frankly, the European institutions do not have many tools to intervene in this, although there will be a housing strategy and, in October, discussion among the prime ministers on housing, etc. Eventually, there will be European funds that could be directed into housing. All this goes there. What our research shows is that there are some national particularities that cannot necessarily be taken from one country and transferred to another. Good examples in housing policy are Denmark and Austria. When we talk about good examples - and this is a conceptual thing - we do not talk only about supply and demand because that is very often the thing: let us supply more flats, which are of course needed very much, or let us increase the demand. Sometimes the subsidies for demand just add to the prices and the prices go automatically up so it does not help very much with affordability. However, in the countries that have much fewer problems with housing there is kind of a middle way also. There is social housing which is partly financed by private investments, partly by public investments. If it is a long-term policy then you see - and Austria is one such example - much less pressure on the housing market. In Denmark they are doing something else. They have an obligation in each new building to have a percentage of the apartments, for example, left for social purposes. This is also in order not to make ghettos with people on low incomes. That also works, and of course they have affordable prices to live there. You always ask from these families or these people to work and to pay for this, but that is much more accessible. These are some of the examples. Again, it is difficult to say, "This is a good example; let us apply it everywhere", because it does not work. I will give the committee an example with Ireland. In Ireland, 90% of the people live in houses and only 10% live in apartments. In Spain, this is the opposite: 88%, I think, live in apartments and a little more than 12% live in houses. It is much easier to build compounds with apartments than to build houses if you are to solve the issue but, again, this has to do very much with preferences. In Germany people very rarely own houses; they rent, and they have no problems with the rent because it is foreseeable. They can rely on the fact that the rent will not go through the roof. There are some regulations on that. People do not own houses the way they do in other countries. There are very different national practices. Again, it helps creating the national policy on that.