Ms Orla Hegarty:

I will start with the issue of master plans. The legislation is in place. The local authorities have the power to develop master development plans and local area plans; they just need the resources to do so. There is a hierarchy of plans from national level to regional level to local level. The advantage in the local authorities carrying out the function is they have the expertise and the planners. There is a broader remit. As they also carry out their local housing strategies, it is a case of having joined-up thinking, rather than duplicating the effort somewhere else, if the resources are provided to enable the local authorities to do this.

Unbundling has been done successfully elsewhere in Europe. In drawing up a local area plan the local authority will know roughly what infrastructure will be provided on every site and what its capacity will be. That in some way will put a cap on the value of land because it will already be known what will happen. Providing the infrastructure means that builders can plug in on the edge of a site, be it for street lighting, drainage, water services or whatever else. It also means the roads will already have been built. It also means that there will be channels for lots of smaller SME builders to become involved. One of the issues that is a real barrier to expanding the construction industry and the creation of gainful employment concerns how fractured it is and it has become even more fractured. There are large entities at the top that might be receiving a lot of public money, as in the example of Carillion, but that money might not be filtering its way down under the terms of the public contract. Rather, it might be filtering down in private contracts into subcontracts to people who are often working in difficult employment conditions. They might be unable to take on apprentices or carry out training or they might be waiting for long periods to be paid. All of this makes employment precarious and it is a barrier to young people becoming involved in construction. What it all means is that the sector is fragile.

If we want to rebuild, we will need the SME builders and the people who perhaps have a contract for ten council houses, out of which they can buy machinery, take on an apprentice and buy a piece of land for a private development. That is how we will build capacity in the housing sector and get some competition going. The other difficulty with bundling these large sites is that there is very little competitive tension if there are few entities which can tender for this work. If the tendering is for small builders, there will be a lot of competition in the market and people whose standards fall short can be weeded out and the work can be prioritised with those who do a good job. In bundling into large entities, all the work is subcontracted and it is very hard to track where the poor practices are. It is also hard to include social and other clauses that could be put into public procurement that would improve some of the other issues in the sector.