Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

We are not prescribing that. We are saying we will look at sites on a case-by-case basis. We are asking councils to be ambitious and to use publicly-owned landbanks much more strategically than they have perhaps been used in the past. We want to promote a different way of developing social housing and the communities served by such housing. We want to integrate private housing with social housing in a much more progressive way. For all of those reasons, we are asking local authorities to submit proposals for the strategic use of publicly-owned landbanks. We want them to create partnerships with the private sector to build some private housing, some social housing and some affordable housing, depending on what kind of mix is appropriate for the local area. People are using ratios that have been politically agreed by a number of parties. In the case of O'Devaney Gardens, for example, there is a mix of 50% private housing, 20% affordable rental and 30% social housing. That is not necessarily the percentage that will apply to every publicly-owned landbank. Sometimes it will make sense to have 100% social housing and sometimes it will make sense to do a deal with a developer to have a 50-50 spilt. Different percentages will be appropriate, depending on what is needed and the area it is in. The core issue here is that we need to get better value out of our publicly-owned land. This is not some giveaway to the private sector. It is about using the leverage we have in terms in public landbanks, either to get cash back from the private sector or to get the private sector to pay for social housing programmes that we might not otherwise be able to afford to develop as quickly, while at the same time availing of the private sector's know-how in terms of design. If we can develop communities that are of a higher quality, are more integrated and have more diversity within them, we will ultimately build healthier communities that involve an awful lot of social housing. For me, all of that is positive. I do not approach this from some sort of ideological position, where all State land must accommodate State housing only. I think that would be a flawed approach. It is not the approach we are taking.

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