Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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I will make a quick comment and then ask a couple of questions. I do not accept that it is not sustainable to have a large proportion of overall housing output as social and affordable housing, irrespective of whether the overall output is 30,000, 40,000 or 50,000 homes. It is a political choice. There are ways of financing the delivery of 40% to 50% of all new homes in the State to meet social and affordable housing demand. In fact, if that is not done, the demand will not be met.

One of the challenges at the minute is that the overwhelming majority of development capital that is funding the building of homes is private sector capital. In fact, most of the State’s capital funding that is going towards new-build homes is purchasing them after the fact. That is incredibly inefficient in two ways. First, it is tying up private sector development capital that could be building private homes and, second, the State is then paying a premium on the cost of private capital.

In this conversation, sometimes it is said that there is no other alternative, but there are alternatives out there; people are just choosing not to take them. That is not an argument against the fact that we need more private sector investment, but there are also different types of private sector investment. In fact, the biggest gap in private sector investment is funding for the small and medium builder-developer sector. They are the only people who are going to build private sector homes in every county in the State, including in the Minister’s own county. These are choices that the Minister is making. They are not inevitabilities.

I have two questions. I was disappointed yesterday when we did not receive the Land Development Agency’s analysis of the potential cost savings of some of the recent changes to apartment sizes because we were hoping to get the LDA documentation. We received a summary document from the Minister’s officials that looked like it was hastily produced yesterday. I am not going to have a row with the Minister about it but will he provide us with the LDA documentation? If some of it needs to be redacted for commercial sensitivity, that is fine. We still need to see that documentation.

Second, I was kind of surprised to see that in the special planning policy requirement No. 1 on page 14 of the new guidelines, social housing and Part V developments are explicitly excluded from the new apartment guidelines but turnkey developments are not. We know that 50% of all new-build social homes and approximately 80% of cost-rental homes are turnkey properties. Will the Minister explain why some social and affordable housing developments will not be able to use the new standards while others will? Surely we should have the same set of standards across social and affordable homes, irrespective of how they are delivered.