Professor Michelle Norris:

To answer the Deputy’s question on the local authority housing organisations we proposed, the view of the commission was that there are huge impediments to increasing the social housing output. There is an impediment in respect of land supply. The Land Development Agency needs to take a more active role in assembling land banks to give out to other social housing providers rather than solely developing themselves to address that. There is a finance capacity issue because the rules around giving finance to local authorities are extremely cumbersome. There is then a capacity issue because local authorities are delivering in very challenging environments. Regulatory environments and planning are very challenging and so on. Local authorities are relatively small organisations to have to deliver in this capacity. The idea of local authority housing organisations is that they are essentially shared service organisations between groups of local authorities. For example, Laois and Offaly county councils might set one up.

This would own the stock on their behalf and do new development. The rental income would go into the new organisation which would allow it to raise debt to build the housing rather than solely relying on the Department of housing. It would also allow it to take on the expert staff it needs to deliver housing - the planners, quantity surveyors, architects, etc. This model is very widely used around Europe. Ireland is very unusual in Europe in that councils are directly involved in housing delivery. In most countries it is done by housing associations - we call them AHBs here - or by municipal housing organisations. It is vital to have more local authority delivery of housing if we are to increase the output. Even though AHBs do a really valuable job, we are reliant on a very small number of them. Three AHBs are doing a huge amount of the delivery. We need to get councils back in the game and we feel this restructuring would address the challenges they face.