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

I too want to raise what I believe to be the scandal of the strategic housing development scheme. I raised it with the Taoiseach yesterday. We put in a submission to the review weeks ago calling for the scheme to be scrapped.

Before the summer, a People Before Profit motion calling for the scheme to be scrapped was passed by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council. This motion was proposed in light of Bartra's absolutely disgraceful strategic housing scheme in Dún Laoghaire, which involves 210 units of little box rooms with fold-out beds but no social or affordable housing. Our opposition to this scheme has now been confirmed by the revelations in an article in The Sunday Business Postat the weekend and by the studies carried out in UCD and elsewhere. It has clearly emerged that the strategic housing development scheme was dreamed up by developers. The Minister who put it forward needs to explain how it is being claimed by developers that he took their plans on board - lock, stock and barrel - and stuck them into the housing Bill. It is now clear that this scheme is nothing more than a licence for property speculators to speculate, to hoard land, to flip land and to print money. It is not delivering what the Minister promised when he introduced the Bill. He said it would deliver housing to address the housing emergency that has developed after the Minister's eight years in government.

We all know the sins of Fianna Fáil and of those who put money into bailing out the rotten and toxic banks, instead of putting it into housing and other public services and forms of infrastructure. We are now paying the cost of that. We need answers. Is it the case, as the developers are claiming, that this Bill was dreamed up by them for them? It is enriching them, while failing to deliver the affordable housing that is needed to address the housing crisis. Two thirds of the houses or apartments that have been approved under this scheme have not commenced. Some of them are for sale. In such cases, it is absolutely clear that properties are being flipped. When planning permission is provided under the fast-track strategic housing scheme, the value of the asset held by the property developer is inflated. This encourages the developer to flip it on and make a lot of money. We know that speculation and hoarding by developers is rampant at the moment. The Minister has said that the delivery of housing has improved, but all the experts are saying we need 35,000 housing units at this stage if we are to catch up with the deficit. We are nowhere near that, but we have the scandal of this scheme failing. Rather than building public and affordable housing on public land, which is what some of us have been asking it to do for five or six years, the Government is continuing to expect profit-driven property speculators to solve the housing crisis when all they are doing is exploiting it.

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