Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The problems with the Land Development Agency have been clear for some time. The main problem is that this Government, like the last Government, seems to think that the best route to deliver public housing is to bypass those institutions that are best at delivering it.

For far too long, local authorities have been starved of funding to build social housing or to get it built but they have also been constricted in the development of a proper affordable rental scheme or affordable purchase scheme. All three types of housing will not by themselves address the housing problems but, if approached properly, they will put a huge dent in the problems we have been plagued with because of Government inaction or wrong action in recent years.

There are huge housing waiting lists for people who want and are entitled to social housing in this State. That problem has not been properly addressed despite the fact that the State owns huge tracts of land throughout the jurisdiction. My constituency, Dublin South-Central, is an example of where the State has both failed and delivered well. People will know Crumlin, Drimnagh and Bluebell, which mainly have social housing that was built in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and afterwards. The area has the greatest concentration of social housing in Ireland. In the south-west inner city, particularly Dublin 8, there are major complexes of social housing in the form of flats. I will return to this in a while. The model showed how social housing can work. It also showed how affordable housing can work because there were schemes in the area run by local authorities, but also by co-operative movements, to build houses at an affordable rate. Many of them were for people who could not get onto the social housing list or were not entitled to be on it because of the income threshold. Their incomes were over the threshold to make them eligible for social housing but they could not afford a home because of the mortgages required at the time. That is very true again in this generation. Large numbers of people have incomes above the social housing threshold. They are workers on low to medium incomes but they could never afford a home in this city. They would have to move quite far away from the city to afford a home that they could call their own. They could not afford the rent either because the rent in this city is now at a level equivalent to mortgage repayments for a home whose purchase price is from €400,000 to €500,000. A whole cohort of society is being squeezed out because the State has never taken on board fully its needs, including its need for affordable housing.

The people who can deliver the housing are those who have delivered housing for us over the years, namely the local authorities. However, the local authorities have been hamstrung by the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage year after year and by Governments that have not funded their building programmes or attempts to move towards the building of affordable homes at the same time as social housing. Dublin City Council has major tracts of land. It has land banks, although not on the same scale as the State. There are State lands in my constituency that are large enough for tens of thousands of homes. Some of this land is already earmarked for development by the local authority. It has put forward plans that involve affordable housing, affordable rental and social housing but we still have not seen the State moving.

People will be aware of the debacle of St. Michael's Estate. It was levelled, and rightly so, but it was supposed to have been rebuilt and regenerated. We are still waiting. There is still no sign of the full development of the affordable rental and social housing model that is to be used in the estate. The same is true of other tracts of land, such as that covered by the Cherry Orchard regeneration scheme, which was signed off in a local area plan not so long ago. Other tracts of land include the CIÉ works land, which was earmarked for a whole new town not so long ago, just before the collapse. That has not been resurrected. It is a huge tract of land that could very easily be used to deliver on the plans we are talking about. Why are we talking about setting up an agency with 50 or 60 staff rather than using existing staff in the local authorities and building up once again the capacity of local authorities to get developers on site and building as quickly as possible?

Another site very near to my door is in Bluebell. I am involved in a community council there. We have worked with Dublin City Council and also with Luas recently to determine how to use lands more effectively in the Bluebell area for social and affordable housing. I am referring to the use of State land that runs along the canal in the area to the betterment of the small community, which is going to be surrounded by private developments that will tower over it. We were told nearly from day one that if we do not use the LDA model, what we propose will not happen. The implication is that if the local community is not willing to come on board, its area will go back down the ladder of areas that the city council and Department are going to consider. We are being held to ransom in that area. In other areas, the same argument is being put forward.

The same is true of Dolphin House, for example. I am on the Dolphin House regeneration board, and I have been for many years. I have worked with colleagues from various parties and agencies on that but all of a sudden we are being told that we cannot go ahead with the continued regeneration of Dolphin House, some of which has been done spectacularly. What has happened to date is absolutely brilliant but all of a sudden the goalposts are shifting. For instance, we are now being told that there is no funding for a community centre or parkland as part of the development and that the only way to proceed is to use the private model. We would have to build according to a private, for-purchase model, not a model based on affordability. It would be private, with the rest of the scheme being affordable and social. I refer to private development on public land to pay for some of the development, particularly the community aspect.

The same is true of other estates and complexes that are being earmarked for redevelopment to bring them into the 21st century and to ensure people are living in fit accommodation. Each time a complex or the council raises the issue with the Department, it is told it is going to have to depend on the LDA as it is going to take charge. That will make everything dearer and ensure some of the affordable purchase schemes will be dearer because the agency will have to recoup its costs. There are major flaws associated with using the agency model rather than continuing with the local authority and addressing the pitfalls and obstacles that exist.

We are being told day in, day out that funding is not a problem internationally in that if governments seek bonds or loans to fund social projects, they are available, and that they can even get some of the funding at a rate of 0%. I appeal to the Minister not to go down the road of the LDA but to use instead the Department, working properly with local authorities, to ensure the delivery of the housing that is required for a new society. The objective should be to regenerate areas that already have problematic housing and to ensure the problems of the cohort who are being squeezed out because their income is above the threshold and who cannot afford a mortgage or to rent are addressed by ensuring the availability of affordable homes for rental and purchase.

In every city anywhere in Europe there are apartments for rent are affordable in the main, though there are examples of huge rents. That is not the case in Ireland. A person cannot get a forty-year lease in Ireland, in the main. It is a year lease here or there. We still have major problems with the approach of landlordism in Ireland and the private rental market.

The Land Development Agency will not address this and will add to the hikes in private rental and private purchase prices. It is not aimed at reducing the cost of rental to working families, those who need to be looked after and those who cannot afford to compete with the millionaires in our society or with the vulture funds and pension funds which are buying up many if not all of the houses on the market. There are whole areas in my constituency where the complaint is that young families who could normally afford to purchase a two-storey, two-bedroom house are competing not only against the State, which is trying to build up its social housing stock, but also against vulture and pension funds, which seem to think these are happy days and are going into the rental market because they can rent these properties on the housing assistance payment, HAP, at the high rate, tying in the local council for ten years to pay the rent so the State will subsidise private landlordism in this State continuously. That is what is happening.

The funding being directed towards private landlords, mainly of late through HAP and partly through the rent allowance, is scandalous and needs to stop. We need to make sure funding from the State subsidises affordable rental and purchases and does not line the pockets of institutions. These are foreign institutions, in many cases, including foreign banking institutions whose concept is to undermine our economy in many ways. It is driving up the price and making us compete with them, and there is no winner in this.

The only way to ensure we start to gain control over our public housing policy and public housing in general, by which I mean social and affordable housing, is by directing all of the State's money in that way rather than subsidising private entities. The Land Development Agency is one more step on that path. Why do we need to set up another agency? Not long ago, the State had a policy of getting rid of agencies and reducing the number of them. Rather than the Department taking responsibility for what is under its remit, it is setting up agencies at one remove so it is not directly responsible for policy or delivery. That is not just in this Department but others as well. Irish Water was set up to undermine local authorities, but it is also one step removed from the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications. The State should be responsible for its own policies and delivery of same rather than setting up a one-step removed agency with staff, a CEO and the huge wages some at the top will be getting. The State should ensure the existing institutions and the staff in them implement the policy of delivering social and affordable housing.

I am not naive enough to expect Dublin City Council or any council will set up a building section within it which will have the wherewithal to build huge estates again. I am not even looking at this stage for the councils to go back to the way they should be doing it of having proper maintenance crews. Regrettably, over the years, in particular since the Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats Government, which cut funding and continually cut the number of people employed by the public sector, there has been a reduction in the number of maintenance staff in every council area and it seems to be policy to reduce the numbers employed. I am not naive enough to think we will go back to the way of having several hundred workers employed by Dublin City Council to build houses or apartment blocks. I am, at this stage, happy enough that councils would be the developers of any State lands within their area to deliver social and affordable housing. They can do that by getting building companies to tender for those works.

We have seen the debacle in terms of State tendering and procurement. That is an area where, perhaps, instead of setting of a land development agency, the State should concentrate on how it can deliver best practice and value for money in tendering. It is getting walked all over day-in, day-out by those putting in bids for different programmes and schemes offered to the private sector. The private sector knows how to win them over and hold them over a barrel. The children's hospital is one example of how the State got procurement wrong. There are good examples, such as the delivery of apartments in Dolphin House and the new schemes there. The contractor there worked with the community to ensure there were apprenticeships and other work available for local residents on that scheme. The end cost is still quite high in terms of delivery of the unit, and much work needs to be done to ensure the price the local authorities deliver houses on can be further reduced. However, it is substantially less than what private developers are indicating. Up to €50,000 and €60,000 per unit is the difference. The Land Development Agency thus far does not indicate that it will be able to deliver in terms of cost.

There are major problems with the Land Development Agency. It is the wrong way to go and the Bill before us has major shortcomings. It has not fully addressed the concerns raised when Fine Gael originally proposed this solution, at which time Fianna Fáil were very critical. Even Fianna Fáil's criticism and proposals have not been taken on board or properly reflected in this Bill. We do not need to go back to the drawing board because the solution is already there. It is a matter of properly funding local authorities to deliver the housing required in those areas, not just in Dublin but throughout the country.

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