Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak on this Bill to establish the Land Development Agency as a designated activity company, DAC, and to transition it from its current iteration into a fully fledged entity capable of borrowing, capable of developing and capable of leading Ireland over the next number of decades into a better plan-led set of regions and country.

I totally reject the assertion of my friend from People Before Profit, who has left, that this is about supporting developers or being engaged with developers. When I look at the people who were involved in developing the Land Development Agency, such as Mr. Niall Cussen, who is now the planning regulator and was the chief planner, and staff from the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform and the Department of Finance, who were behind this both intellectually and conceptually and in terms of delivery, I see deeply committed public servants who wanted to achieve a mechanism by which the national planning framework could be realised and by which Ireland could have a proper role in land development and a real commercial stake in the value of Irish land and how that evolved. I do not believe it has anything to do with the friends of Johnny Ronan or the friends of anybody else. I genuinely believe this is about the State taking a solid step into the management and development of its own land, and not only that which it holds but also an interest in how it can acquire strategic pieces of land generally.

The purpose of the Land Development Agency is to give the State a vehicle to rebalance the boom-bust cycles we had seen for so long around development which had been genuinely developer led. Where before the State had no real capacity to manage land prices, to operate countercyclically and to plan land for not only housing but also the development of towns and cities in any sort of strategic way, the Land Development Agency gives us that new opportunity. We have been speaking about it as a housing delivery entity, and at a time of housing crisis that is understandable, but it is not only that. The Land Development Agency gives the State an ability to plan for whole quarters of towns and villages. It gives the State the opportunity to combine the technical and financial firepower available at the centre with the very best of local knowledge and decision-making where the Land Development Agency and local authorities can work together to deliver master plan projects.

Local authorities have 50,000 things to do every day, only one of which is land development. It is reasonable in any modern democracy that there would be a centre of excellence in strategic planning backed by finance that would be able to provide assistance to local authorities and other State entities to deliver their land in a way that is of benefit to the community and that is remunerative potentially to semi-State agencies. None of the HSE, the Department of Education or CIÉ is a land development body. The local authorities are to a part, but it is only one part. We have in this State taken centres of excellence in other ways because we know that idea works. We have seen it working in healthcare and other sectors. It is about providing technical assistance to local authorities to be able to deliver their land.

The purpose is to provide a countercyclical way to drive State lands for regeneration and development, open up key sites not being used effectively for housing delivery to date, remove the barriers for that and provide support to local authorities. Its purpose in the long term is to drive strategic land assembly, working with both public and private sector landowners to smooth out barriers to development and, crucially, as we have seen as being so important in the housing crisis, to stabilise land values.

This entity has often been linked to IDA Ireland. In a way, that is a little facetious and there is no reason for it to be. The IDA, when one thinks about what it did many decades ago, tried to partner with local authorities to develop banks of land that could be used to build business parks in strategic locations to drive employment, particularly around the regions. It was everybody coming together collaboratively to put on the green jersey to develop land in these ways to provide regional employment and regional development. The Land Development Agency can operate in the same way by partnering with local authorities to make sure they have the support they need. Any time one sees a house, the steps that led to that house being built came together five or, more likely, ten years previously and the programming building element of the Land Development Agency is a key part of that.

In the Bill, there is a significant focus on housing and housing delivery, and that is appropriate for now. However, the purpose and vision of the Land Development Agency goes way beyond that. It is about consolidation of land. It is about ensuring we deliver compact growth, especially on brownfield sites. It is about managing State surplus lands where they exist, of which housing will be prominent in the initial stages, but there is plenty of other work to do. There is no point in building rows and rows of houses if the business parks and employment are miles away. It is about building places. It is about supporting parks, amenities and places to live, and not just housing delivery. It is much more strategic than that, although it encompasses it.

We can see that in five or ten years from now we will have a different and new set of forward-looking priorities to make sure Ireland is operating in the best way it can, which I hope will go beyond housing because we will have realised there is so much more for the Land Development Agency to do. It is not only about housing. It is about living smartly.

The IDA was the cornerstone of Irish economic policy that got us out of such a difficult state of unemployment and an inability to develop to genuine world success. In a slightly similar way, the Land Development Agency, LDA, may be an instrument to build on what we have but may be transformative in reshaping our cities and towns in the way that we need to. In this focus on housing delivery, we risk losing our discussion of that vision for the Land Development Agency and, indeed, much more importantly, that vision for Ireland, if we forget what it is capable of beyond housing delivery.

We have sprawling cities and doughnut towns. The LDA can be a stimulus and new mechanism to turn that around, building with the local authorities. How does a local authority, county council or any other entity come up with a master plan and go through all the procurement in order to have a financial tap to the millions of euro that are needed to regenerate whole quarters and do all of the other things? It is completely appropriate that one has a centre of technical expertise that can come in and provide support.

I will address some of the criticisms of the Land Development Agency. The first is that it is a sort of new NAMA but that is not the case. When one looks back at NAMA, it was dealing with a whole set of unknowns, unknown site values and exposures. With the Land Development Agency, we are dealing with known site values but what we have not had is the firepower to develop them.

I refer to the point on section 183, which has been raised by councillors. I have a great deal of sympathy for the argument they have made. From the LDA’s perspective, it is completely understandable that it wants to de-risk the development of different sites. One can look at Dublin City Council and the Oscar Traynor Road project, which was ultimately pulled, or at my area of Shankill, where the project went back to the local authority for a vote and went through. Up to that point, however, much work had been put into developing and coming up with a master plan for the site. It was being developed nearly to the point of tender. One could see how one would want to de-risk it at that point. The danger with that, having worked collaboratively with the council, is that if one has this hanging over councillors or, indeed, council management at the end it somehow damages the relationship in an important way. This is one issue to reflect on. This issue has not really arisen except for that one situation but the potential for harm with local government may outweigh the ancillary benefits of being able to de-risk. Is another approach possible? If it was evident that there was a problematic local authority, where councillors or management were being obstructive or ineffective or had identified plots of land which were not developing them, either by refusing or not being able to do so or not co-operating with the Land Development Agency in the way this House will hopefully set out, the Minister may have powers under different Acts, whether the planning or housing Acts, to intervene and give direction in those circumstances. For this to fall into the LDA Bill risks damaging the relationship between the LDA and local authorities.

I will address the issue of transparency. I believe it was said by Deputy Ó Broin, although I do not wish to be unfair to him, that the LDA will not be subject to the Freedom of Information Act and be transparent. I understand he has set up LDA-watch. That is not a fair criticism. The Land Development Agency is subject to the Freedom of Information Act, as will all of the subsidiary DACs it will establish. The setting up of LDA-watch is to suggest this agency is being set up by quasi-criminals or something to that effect. It is a body of this State being financed by the State and being given powers by this House. We need to be careful about that.

There is also a criticism that this agency is going to take land and flip it for private development. That is not the case either. The whole point of this is to develop the State as a strategic long-term player in the price of land.

On the mix of affordability, it is clear that it is appropriate to have a measure of flexibility. It is a totally to different situation in Shankill and Dundrum, where affordable housing is desperately needed. I heard the Minister say that the mix will go up very considerably in social and affordable housing. That may not be the case in other areas where there is already a very high provision of social and affordable housing. It is already a strong tenet of planning and social policy that one has a good social mix of different forms of housing. It is essential that there is a measure of flexibility.

My last point is on cost-rental housing and how welcome it is as a new housing concept. It has been difficult to explain and to sell as new housing ideas are and can be. Cost-rental offers a huge opportunity for people either on fixed incomes or on incomes that are unlikely to change. If one was working as a primary school teacher, one's income would put one beyond social and affordable housing but one's income is never going to grow exponentially or go beyond a certain point. However, one is always going to have a housing need. Cost-rental gives people the opportunity to fix their costs in an affordable way and it gives the State a long-term set of assets and a role that can be adjusted for social policy over time.

I support the Minister in the development of the Bill, congratulate him on bringing it forward, thank him for the opportunity to speak on it and wish him well in the next Stages of it.

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