Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate the chance to speak on behalf of the Green Party and I commend Sinn Féin and others who promoted this debate.

The huge housing crisis is probably one of the most urgent issues we need to address. We need to get three factors right in doing this. We need to build the right homes, in the right place and at the right price. I want to look broadly at these three aspects. On the issue of the right homes, yesterday I attended a conference organised by the Construction Industry Federation at which a speaker from the Society of Chartered Surveyors set out some of the typical costs and tried to address the issue we have between costs and market price. However, all of the analysis in the presentation was based on the building of semi-detached housing. It was based on the standard Irish semi-detached three-bedroomed house. This depressed me as that is not necessarily the real problem. We need to build housing closer to the centres of our towns and cities and the housing required is not necessarily the traditional family unit. It seems like developers and our housing industry are stuck in an old way of thinking that it is about building endless rows of semi-detached housing, further and further out from our cities and continuing the urban sprawl we have seen over the past 50 years. The whole conference seemed stuck in that mindset.

I am also slightly despondent that in his period as Minister, Deputy Kelly seemed to change the narrative. We were moving towards ever more efficient and low-cost housing as a result of energy efficiencies. However, it seems the Minister has made regulatory changes providing him with powers to overrule local authorities who seek to set higher standards. For example, my colleagues in Dún Laoghaire had succeeded in getting cross-party agreement to move towards higher passive house styles and standards but now they have been stymied by a direction from the central power to say they cannot do that. I believe that is a mistake, even if it is based on good intentions, such as the fear about housing costs. That does not take into account the real cost of housing in that the owners of the properties built will instead, over the 50 years or so those properties will exist, pay higher costs year in, year out because we are not willing to take the next step to cut out the use of fossil fuels for heating, although this is something we need to do because of climate change. We are building the wrong type of houses. If we are going to build the right houses, let us start by making them energy efficient to the extreme. That is what we need to do. The owners of these houses will benefit and have lower bills for their lifetime.

The Minister may argue that he lowered the standard in terms of the size of apartments in an attempt to lower costs for new home owners. However, I would argue that we should be returning closer to city and town centres and bringing families back to these centres where we have schools and public transport and all the other services. This would be a cheaper way to develop housing rather than the alternative model of continuing the spread outwards where the State must pick up the cost of providing public transport services, health and educational services. We need to bring people back to our town and city centres and if we are doing that, we need to provide good quality accommodation in which people can raise children.

We will not do that if we go back to the old developer-led model, which I fear the Minister has done, which is about building box apartments and not really being concerned about the nature or quality of the homes which will be there for the next 50, 60 or 100 years. We need to build the right houses. We should start by building quality, efficient low-cost houses - the right houses for the real need we have, which is not necessarily semi-detached houses out in new greenfield sites on which we have fixated in the past 40 or 50 years.

As well as being in the right place we also need to get right a national spatial plan which will identify where demand is going to be and what numbers are needed in areas based on demographics and an understanding of where jobs are going to come. That has to be centre stage in any housing strategy or plan so that we can build houses close to people's place of work. I am concerned about presentations from the Department showing that, in the Dublin area, we have a number of houses ready to go on serviced land. I cannot remember exactly what the number was - I think it was some 45,000 houses - but the vast majority of the sites were on the far side of the M50. If the Department does not already know this it needs to start talking to the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport because in Dublin city the M50 will gridlock on the existing growth in traffic from the existing housing stock. If we put yet more housing on the far side of the M50 and expect people to get into the city to work it will not work. We need integration of transport, planning and housing such as we have never had in this State. I do not see it today and nor do I see it at the centre of the new spatial plan but we have to get it right if we are to build houses in the right place.

I do not want to be personal but the Minister and the former Deputy, Phil Hogan, made decisions not to proceed with a directly elected mayor of Dublin who would be able to go over the fundamental problem which has crippled this city in the past 30 or 40 years, namely, the different agencies fighting each other and the different counties looking for development. That was a mistake.

My third and last point is that we need to build at the right price, as well as the right houses in the right place. The conference yesterday was interesting and Ronan Lyons, the economist from Trinity College Dublin, made a couple of important points. It is vital that we introduce the site value tax that we set up, in place and ready to go but which the previous Government decided not to proceed with. It is vital for a number of reasons. One is that one would get more concentrated, better development closer to the centre. Another is that we would find out who actually owns the land in this country. One of the difficulties in the negotiations to set up a site value taxation was the Department of Finance saying it could not do it because we did not know who owned what land and it would require us to develop a proper, full tally of who owns our land. If we are to tackle the housing crisis and not go back to the corrupt, developer-led system we had in the past it would be very healthy to start by understanding who owns every parcel of land and to be transparent and open about transactions involving land. It is important to put a site value tax on, as well as the vacant site tax about which the Minister spoke.

When the Minister had legal opinion saying he could not go ahead with the vacant site tax in 2016 but had to wait to 2019, and could not set it at 6% but 3%, did he not think that, on this occasion, it might have been worth taking the legal challenge and going to the courts if necessary? Let the Supreme Court adjudicate on it. The Supreme Court is as political as any other institution. It would, as Deputy Shortall said, read the Constitution and look at the competing questions so we should have put it to the test of the Supreme Court instead of accepting the legal argument. It is not too late for an incoming government to do that if it really wanted to tackle the issue.

The Central Bank did the right thing to put in regulations to restrict the level of lending for houses. I know it is difficult for young people but it would have been far worse to allow price rises to come back again which would mean that, while people might get a mortgage, they would pay a lot more. Ronan Lyons said there may be a case to look at loan-to-value ratios rather than loan-to-income and I think he may be right because that might encourage people to build and buy more efficient houses in the right areas.

I listened with dismay to some of the figures the quantity surveyor was giving out and questioned some of them, and the Construction Industry Federation is not actually stepping up to the plate to look at a different building model which will be really efficient in bringing down costs. I echo what other people have said and believe that to tackle this housing crisis we need to do this. Fundamentally, it is time for the State to build in order to provide housing. It will be 15% cheaper because the assumed profit the quantity surveyor put into the calculation would not exist if the State was doing it. We should do it with the rent-cost model set out by the National Economic and Social Council because this would iron out a lot of the inefficiencies and inequities in the current social housing model. We would also get financing for it and it would lead to more mixed housing, a subject about which Deputy Shortall spoke, where those who are not able to afford the assumed market rent would be subsidised directly by the housing association or local authority which builds it.

In every one of his speeches here the Minister has waved a piece of paper saying there is €40 million for Waterford or €50 million for somewhere else but it is time to change the underlying model rather than just throwing money at the problem. We should use this as a chance to get a better model of social housing so that we can borrow upon it, as countries such as Austria do, outside the rules of the fiscal compact. That is the scale of ambition and change we should to be looking to have rather than just quoting from a paper.

See this speech in context