Cian O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay North, Social Democrats)
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I thank the Cathaoirleach and our guests for coming in. In regard to the IPI’s view on whether this is the best way to do land value capture to capture the uplift in land values, there is a key challenge in terms of housing affordability. The planning system, for many good reasons, restricts people’s abilities to build and puts many constraints on that. Arguably there is not a sufficient amount of measures to ensure that restriction is counterbalanced with measures to ensure affordability. Land values and land value capture measures are part of that. In the IPI’s view are there any better ways of doing land value capture? Is this the best way? Do the witnesses have a view on that?

Active land management has been referenced quite a bit here. We are sitting in a city that more than 200 years ago had very active land management with the Wide Streets Commission. That effectively had compulsory purchase order, CPO, powers. The issues of different landowners were circumvented by the Wide Streets Commission buying up different plots of land and doing radical alterations in terms of our streetscapes that we can now see. The George’s Street Arcade, which I believe is one of the finest buildings in Dublin, came about from an Act of Parliament that gave the Wide Streets Commission the ability to buy up different plots of land to put in what was then the south city market. The idea of active land management is not new. It was done on a far more radical level than is being proposed now.

I recently read an OECD report on land use and planning systems throughout the OECD that listed off countries like Austria, Finland, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Norway, Spain and the United States where land banking powers exist for pre-emptive purchase rights at an improved valuation. They are much more radical measures. Given our housing affordability crisis and indeed our infrastructure crisis, is this going far enough? Are there other models? What are the views of the IPI on that?