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

I will let the Minister make the case for that one. I will speak to the amendments tabled by People Before Profit. They relate to the Title of the Bill and, essentially, the setting out of its purposes and the purpose of the Land Development Agency, LDA. In some ways, the amendments in this group are a summary of many of the problems we have with the Government's plan for the LDA and what it should do. I will try to summarise them briefly.

The LDA should be an agency that assembles land and, in particular, land that might be hoarded or speculated upon by private owners and developers or property that is being sat on that could be used, if suitable, for the housing we need to address the dire housing crisis. That is what the LDA should be. Its sole purpose should be to try to assemble land that may be in the ownership of other State agencies for the purposes of delivering public and affordable housing. A failure to do this is the reason for the dire housing and homelessness crisis.

The LDA's purpose, as set out in this Bill, amounts to a means through which private finance, developers and property investment entities and so on will gain access to the entire public land bank. The latter should be used to deliver public and affordable housing but will instead be used to make profit for some of those interests. This, in turn, will affect the ability of the Government to use the public land bank to deliver public housing of the scale we need and to ensure that it is genuinely affordable instead of the price being set by private developers or financial interests which now might gain access to that land bank.

In the Title to the Bill, there are references to designated activity companies, DACs, and the Bill will allow the public land bank to be parcelled into companies that will be taken from local authority control and these will, in effect, control the land bank and dictate what is done with it. There are also references in the Title to market price with respect to the delivery of affordable housing. I see the Minister shaking his head because the term has been changed with a reference to the affordable housing legislation. When we cross-check the new wording inserted via the Minister's amendment and the affordable housing legislation, we can see it does not set out in any clear terms how it can be guaranteed that the public land bank will be used to deliver genuinely affordable housing. It will all be prescribed by the Minister and there are also references to the market. This is the fundamental problem.

In the amendments we have tabled, we are seeking to ensure that the LDA will only be about the provision of public and affordable housing. We also want to ensure that affordable housing will always remain affordable. We will explain later how that should be done but, essentially, we suggest that a property cannot be sold to the market but rather that it must be sold to local authorities. The proportion of affordable and public housing should be decided by local authorities and there should be public consultation on that. The land should not be parcelled up for use by DACs, it should remain in the hands of the local authorities.

Our amendments rule out the use of public private partnerships, thus protecting the public land bank from the invasion of private investment funds, speculators and so on that would drive up the price of the affordable housing. Such partnerships might privatise potentially significant parts of the public land bank and make it almost certain that much of the supposedly affordable housing would be unaffordable. The Minister has infamously spoken about affordable housing in certain parts of the country, notably in Dublin, reaching a ceiling of €450,000 and €400,000 and €350,000 in other areas.

That is not affordable at all for the vast majority of people. We do not want private finance or private investors to have anything whatsoever to do with setting the amount of public and affordable housing, the price of the affordable housing or the rents in the cost-rental housing. We want stripped out of both Bills any references to the benchmarking of affordability against market conditions or the diktats of private finance.

That is the summary of the first 12 of 63 amendments we have tabled to the Bill. The broad thrust is very simple. Keep the public land bank public, use the public land bank to deliver public and genuinely affordable housing and have no privatisation whatsoever of the public land bank, which we believe the Government's Bill in its current form will facilitate.

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