Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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Yes, and they might have it but if not, they can pass them on to me. They are still relevant questions. To meet that demand which, in total, depending on how the figure is calculated, will be approximately 5,000 households in real terms over the next few years, and to reduce those waiting lists, we would have to have a considerably higher level of delivery than we have currently. I do not see how we can do that with our current plans for land use. If we take the Shanganagh site, for example, we are only talking about 200 social houses. Ms Keenan might clarify the number of Part V housing units she expects to see delivered. She can extrapolate from the figures she gave on planning permissions, although getting planning permission is not the same as houses being built. I refer to all the other sites also. Work on the Shanganagh site will not start for some time. Ms Keenan indicated it will take nine months just to get through the various bits and pieces that have to be done. The houses must then be built and so on. After that, I do not see where the rest will come from for years. Is that a fair assessment of the dilemma we face?

How can we accelerate the process? Does it not necessitate getting a much higher proportion of public housing on the lands we have, rather than entertaining public private partnerships, PPPs, and so on, which will lower the proportion of public housing we get on those sites, never mind the complications that might arise? Ms Keenan seems to be saying the public spending code is limiting her because of the threshold. She inferred that the threshold should rises. Is it not a major problem for the council, in trying to work out what affordability is, that there is a requirement to have a proportion of affordable houses and also, as she stated, to consider PPPs? The need to consider the finances of all of that is slowing everything. The council cannot progress because it must consider a PPP, which is, I presume, related to the financing of the rest of the sites, and must also consider affordable housing, with which it is having difficulty for the reasons Ms Keenan outlined. These include that the housing market in Dún Laoghaire is highly inflated and trying to work out what affordable is and how it can be financed is a complexity. Would it not be easier to develop the entire Shanganagh site as public housing because the council would not have those problems? It would also mean that we would get close to hitting our targets in terms of social housing need.

On another issue I raised previously with Ms Keenan, Mel Reynolds has made a suggestion which, given the scale of the demand, I believe we should consider. On sites like Cherrywood and other private development sites, we are waiting for the social or Part V element to be delivered. We do not know when the developers will deliver it and we do not get it until the developments have been completed. Mel Reynolds has said we should take 10% of the land upfront to avoid being dependent on the developers. If we did that in Cherrywood, we would have sufficient land on which to build 800 houses. Four or five different developers own Cherrywood and we have no idea when that housing will be delivered. We have to wait until the end of that process to get our portion and we will have to negotiate prices with the developers, which almost certainly will be very high. Would it not be better for us to get the 10% of land upfront and build out ourselves, rather than waiting for the developers to build? Would that not accelerate the delivery of the Part V housing?