Ms Anne Colgan:

The capacity of local authorities to deliver social housing is beyond question. At the moment, a total of 30,000 units are in the pipeline in over 2,000 schemes. These are waiting to be delivered or at various stages of delivery.

I wish to focus specifically on the question of affordability and the provisions in the Bill relating to it that the Deputy asked about. Affordability is at the core of the Bill. Since affordability is defined in terms of a drop in market price, there is no policy clarity about what it actually means. There is no reason to suppose that a drop in market price would deliver any level of affordability, especially in urban areas. Our view is that this needs to be replaced with something far more robust in terms of the affordability criteria.

Cost rental should be related to the cost of development and delivery. In fact, that is mentioned in the Affordable Housing Bill. We would like to see some alignment between those two tranches of legislation so that cost rental would be related to cost of production in all its elements.

The affordability of housing for sale needs to be worked out in terms of anything other than market price. The LDA does not have to deal in market price. Land is provided for it. Its raison d'êtreis about capacity to borrow at reasonable prices. It has the possibility of efficient and effective large-scale developments. All of those things mean it will be able to deliver housing at significantly less than market prices. If it cannot do that, then it cannot justify its existence. There is no reason that affordable housing for sale should be linked to market prices. We believe that provision in the Bill needs to be reconsidered.