Emmet Stagg (Kildare North, Labour)

My county council, on foot of a motion tabled by its chairman, Councillor John McGinley, has set up a working party to report on this matter to the Minister. There is no need for a working party or another report. The council will probably hire consultants to do this work because, even though it employs 67 full-time engineers, they could not fill a pothole without a consultant's report. When I was a member of the local authority, I asked whether the consultants were more qualified than our engineers. The county engineer replied that we had the best qualified engineers in the world. I asked, if that was the case, why they did not do the work of the consultants. The county engineer replied that I did not understand how the system worked. He said a group of our engineers monitor the consultants while another group interprets their reports. I then went outside to check whether I was in a lunatic asylum or a county council office.

This issue is clear. County managers are misusing a section of the planning Act to impose — wrongly and without a legal basis — management companies on householders, thereby hiving off their responsibilities for services to individual householders and privatising public services by the back door. We want the Minister to put a stop to this practice forthwith and to put in place a procedure for the winding up of the companies, including the removal from the deeds of the individual householders of the lien on their properties imposed by the manager's planning condition. Legislation is required to regulate management companies and to control their charges in apartment blocks where they may be required. I would prefer if co-operative management could be considered in apartment blocks rather than the imposition of management companies.

Developers are required to give 20% of the houses they build to the local authority for sale or rent to people on the affordable housing lists. Not many have been handed over to Kildare County Council but of those, a significant number has been handed over on estates run by management companies. In fact, much of what we have been offered by the private sector for social housing are more or less shoe boxes designed for singles in yuppie-land. They are entirely unsuitable for the needs of a family and are being offered because it seems they are the cheapest. I am not sure how they measure up. I have been in some and one would hardly get a pram down the corridors in the living quarters.

The people who move in are required to pay a management charge and become shareholders. There is no regulation in this area. I want the Minister to examine if the county council will be the shareholder in such a case and will pay the management charge or whether the individual, probably on social welfare payments, will be required to pay the charge or be thrown out by his or her fellows in the private part of the building. That might be possible too.

The final point made by my colleague in introducing this subject was that domestic rates are back. I am prepared to give the Minister the benefit of the doubt, but that might disappear very quickly when the Minister responds to this motion, which we hope he might accept, given his previous comments. We will know by the Minister's response whether domestic rates are back.

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