Brian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein)
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Deputy Colm Burke mentioned capital projects. This is an issue I have raised with Graham Doyle, the Secretary General of the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage. At the moment, we are in a housing crisis. I am approaching this in a constructive way. I am not making a criticism but it is one of the issues that I fail to understand. We have to mass-produce houses, particularly social housing. I am not talking about low quality housing but good quality affordable housing and cost-rental housing. The State has, thank God, at last moved to doing that but personally I would like to see it on a larger scale.

As I recall, around 2002 local authorities were instructed that all local authority housing be architecturally designed. Up to then it was done in-house. Nice, good and practical local authority houses were built that were very easy to maintain. I will not go into it because I have said all this before. Looking at examples of houses built before that period and ones built after, the ones built after are totally impractical and awful looking. They are not all awful looking but some of them are terrible. I am not sure what the move to architecturally designed houses did. I could rattle off some bad examples of where there were maintenance problems afterwards but that is for another day.

A couple of years after that I was chair of a housing strategic policy committee, SPC, and the cost of architecturally designing was 7% or 8%. One senior local authority figure told me recently that it is now up to 10%. I mentioned the 7% figure and they said it was closer to 10% now. We built a lot of houses in the 1930s. I am not arguing for them. I pass them coming in here in the morning. They are okay. They are fine. I lived in a house like that for a good few years, no problem. I am not arguing that we should go back to those two-up, two-down houses. What I am saying is that one of the reasons we were able to build those is that we did not mess around by starting with a blank canvas for every site. We started with a drawing from the local authority. The houses I pass are in Sligo, Portlaoise, Donegal and Waterford. I have seen them all over the country. If we want to build houses on that scale, that is what we have to do.

I am raising this in the context of the pounds, shillings and pence of it. It is taking up 5% or 10% of the cost, which is outrageous. Graham Doyle would say to the committee, and I accept this, that there is now a standardised framework within the Department but that is not the same thing. That is not what I am talking about. What I am talking about is a standard design. In other words, the only blank canvas should be the actual site. Obviously there is a need for different types of housing. There is a need for single-storey housing for elderly people and people with disabilities. There is a need for apartments, and houses with one, two, three or four bedrooms. There is a need for rural housing, semi-detached houses, terraced houses and so on. I get all of that. There is only way we can do that. I will give this example. There have been situations where decisions about the hood over the front door or the type of windowsill have gone back and forth between the local authorities and the Custom House. This has been going on over the last number of years. The people in the Custom House have a job to do but that is not their job. They could give the money to the local authorities but the local authorities are strangled trying to deal with this. They did not have the staff, although there have been some improvements there and I welcome that. The Government has moved on that but the Department needs to move further on it.

One thing holding up all of this and costing more money is this ludicrous situation where we have different designs for every development. We have good examples of good houses built in the last two or three years. In the case of social housing, we should use those examples and just build the bloody things. It is the same for affordable housing. People in Laois or Cork are not worried that there is someone in Donegal living in the same type of house as them. This includes people who want to buy an affordable house. Most people are priced out of what is called the market and we need to get people into a position where they can buy an affordable house. It is a good scheme but we need to accelerate it. It is not even in first gear yet. That is the problem. I am asking Mr. Moloney, as Secretary General of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, to take this up with the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage. I have raised this with previous housing Ministers. I have raised it with Secretaries General. Graham Doyle said he would talk about this again. Maybe there is an openness there now to do it. Can Mr. Moloney raise this now with the Minister? It is not a policy issue; it is procedural issue. Shuffling papers back and forward from local authorities to the Custom House and adding up to 10% extra onto the cost is absolutely bananas in the middle of a housing crisis. I ask Mr. Moloney to give me a view on that. What can be done about it?