Mr. Eddie Taaffe:

The figure that I have at the moment for local authority owned land is 563 sites that have a potential delivery of 21,500 houses. I do not have the subset of that that is zoned. I estimate that all of it is either formally zoned or is in such a format in towns and villages that it would be it be acceptable for development. It might not have a formal zoning on it but the principle of residential development on it would be accepted in the county development plan.

I would imagine that is what it was because it would not have made its way into that land bank data without that figure. It is important to say that is the local authority social and affordable housing supply for the next number of years. If you look at it in another way, if our target is 12,000 social houses, that is less than two years' supply. You can see that while it sounds like a big figure, it is not in reality.

On the land value tax, it is too early to say. The RZLT kicks in now at 3%. It is too early to say really but I think it is a worthwhile measure and we should see what effect that has on the price of residentially zoned land.

On the affordable housing need, the HNDA was, I suppose, a model to look at that and house prices in an area, and then look at CSO data on incomes. Then there are obviously people who would like to be able to buy a property but their income limit would not allow them to buy it because of the macroprudential rules from the Central Bank. Their income levels might be too high to qualify them for social housing so they are at that pinch point in the middle. That is what the affordable housing schemes operated by the Department are aimed at.

My opinion on it is that to gauge what that need or demand is, several local authorities have done a survey. They have gone out to people and said they are looking at providing affordable houses in the local authority. They asked them what area they would like to live in, what their salary is, and what they see as an affordable housing price. That is the real gauge of what is out there and what the demand is. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who aspire to own a property but their incomes will never put them in that bracket where they will be able to afford even an affordable house. We need to assess, and the best way to do that is with the surveys. Cork County Council, Cork City Council and some of the Dublin authorities have done that. We have done a limited one in Wexford but we are going to do a more general one, and that is the real measure of what people see as their need, where they want to live and what their ability is in terms of income to know what is affordable and what is not affordable for them. To my mind, that is the real measure.