Mr. Gavin Lawlor:

I think you need to be careful with that. That sort of sentiment is not listening to the developers. If it is not possible to sell a house, it is not possible to sell a house. What we need to be able to determine is whether that is truthful or not and whether it is gaming, for want of a better description, or trying to overemphasise to influence a decision. We keep talking about things being developer led or plan led. We do not have a developer-led system; we have a plan-led system. That is what we have and we want to make it, by the sounds of things, more plan led or more plan focused. If developers are telling us that something is uneconomic, then we need to look to ways to make it economic if that is what we want. It is the classic thing of carrot and stick - what is the carrot and what is the stick?

The housing needs demand assessment, and we need to be careful with this, tells us what types of houses we need, whether they are three bedrooms, one bedroom, cost rental, social or private. All the developers are likely to achieve in the traditional format is private housing but increasingly we are looking at developers to deliver all the other forms of housing. We keep talking about local authorities delivering those forms of housing but they do not have the resources to do that currently. They do not currently have the expertise to do that in volume so we have to rely on the development community to deliver those types of housing. The types of housing we want that sits within the local authorities' domain, which is the cost rental, local authority housing etc., they control that. They have a budget for that and they go to the market and say they want to buy this or that or they want people to build here, so they have absolute control of that.

That is the tenure piece but the other part of the housing demand needs assessment is the housing piece. How do we make sure we are delivering enough housing? That is again evidence based. I do not think we are properly looking at the translation rate, which was mentioned earlier by Senator Cummins. When we zone a piece of land, why is it not being developed? Is it because somebody cannot sell it, like the suggestion that was given where a farmer cannot sell it because it has an impediment or some sort of issue with it, or is it that they do not want to sell it? We are trying to put all these pressure points in place to push towards the development of zoned land and it is still not quite coming at the rate we want it to. We need to start to reflect and ask why that is. Is there a historical norm in terms of the rate of translation from zoned land or even the time it takes between zoning a piece of land and getting a home built on it, whether that is a local authority house or otherwise?

Houses are not built in a day. We are talking about moving to a ten-year plan but we have a six-year development plan now. If you zone a piece of land at the very beginning of that that was unzoned, a person has to get a planning application in or the local authority has to bring forward a planning application, that application gets considered, goes through An Bord Pleanála, potentially goes through a judicial review, ultimately gets permission and then has to go into its detailed design, get funding and get developed. Six years is not a long time, unfortunately, in terms of the development of housing. We need to look at the evidence-based approach of how long it is taking for sites to get from A to B. If it is taking a long time, we have to ask what the key impediments to that are and if there is a way or if it is possible to speed to that up. If it is not, we need to reflect that in the housing needs assessment piece and in the zoning piece to recognise that there is this lag and this delay. I do not have the answers. I do not know if that is correct or not but it needs to be evidence based. Again, it goes back to the mantra we keep drumming out - what are the facts, what do they show us and what do they say? Then we can start to make meaningful interventions in the delivery of housing.