Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

One can get many students into small spaces and there is much money to be made in that. Many people can be put into hotels and there is much money to be made in that as well. There is not as much money to be made in building decent and affordable residential property. Such people go where the money is and the Bill will still encourage them to do so rather than delivering social and affordable housing. Even if the legislation did that, it still would not work, and the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown area illustrates this point.

If the private developers deliver in a speedy timeframe, which they will not unless the Minister helps to provide staff and the local authorities do it themselves - I will get to that point in a moment - there would be no difference in our area anyway because of affordability. The average house price in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown is €498,000, which is €160,000 higher than the average in Dublin, €210,000 higher than the average in Fingal and €230,000 higher than the average in south Dublin. That is completely unaffordable. Nevertheless, the Minister is leaving this to private developers who will charge such prices.

The trend is similar with rents. The average rent for a one-bedroom home is €1,800 per month and for a three-bedroom home it is €2,280, which is totally unaffordable. If those prices come down and there is not enough money in it for the developers, which they and the Minister keep saying is the big problem, they will not increase supply. They will stop at the point at which prices start to come down because they are interested in price and profit. The supply will never equal demand because the only demand they are interested in will result in high prices or rents.

They are not interested in absolute demand; they are interested in effective demand backed by money that is willing to pay these extortionate prices. Given that they have a monopoly of control of the land, and in light of the Minister's decision to give them most of the control over the social and affordable housing that will be delivered, why on earth would they develop or increase supply to the point at which prices would begin to decrease? They have never done this in the past and they are simply not going to do it in the future. It is for that reason that direct builds are needed.

I will conclude by talking about the real delays associated with direct builds, even in cases of Part 8 planning. The Minister is talking about reducing the amount of time that councillors will have to make decisions. The real delay relates to the tendering process that is necessary as a result of the outsourcing of local authorities' public and social housing. We got a breakdown of this from Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council. We need to address the activity that is accounting for the bulk of the time that is being lost by directly employing people to build houses on public land. If we do not do this, the approach being pursued by the Minister in this legislation will make a negligible difference, or no difference at all, to the problem of slow delivery of houses. We need direct labour that is directly employed to build local authority housing on public land. That will force the private developers to build. If the public sector begins to build housing, the private sector will be forced to crystallise its land holdings into development.

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