Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

None of what the Minister of State said reassures me that there is not a significant cost variance between approved housing body availability, payment agreements and public private partnerships. At the heart of this is the public sector benchmark, which is used to calculate that so-called value for money exercise. None of us get to see it. There is no transparency around it and we are not in a position to be able to verify what the Minister of State is saying, either here today or in previous parliamentary questions. On the basis of what the Minister of State said here today, the construction cost per unit is €225,000. That is higher than figures I have received from the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government on comparative costs for local authority builds. In this contract with the public private partnership, there is a different inflation calculation to the one used for approved housing bodies, a different calculation for what the Minister of State called equality requirements, and an element of profit and risk adjustment. While I accept the two types of contracts, availability agreements with the approved housing body sector and PPPs are not the same, they do very similar things and nothing the Minister of State has said has reassured me that there is not a cost difference, if not a significant cost difference. Has the Minister of State seen the public sector benchmark? Is he satisfied that both the methodology used and the price comparisons represent value for money to the taxpayer?

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