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

All the amendments in the group are from Solidarity-People Before Profit. We discussed much of this subject matter in the previous, more general, discussion, which concerned the Title, but this is the group of amendments dealing with us setting out the alternative approach that we feel should have been pursued with the Land Development Agency. This is to make it a land assembly agency that could create a pipeline of land necessary in order to ensure the supply of public and affordable housing by local authorities primarily, approved housing bodies and not-for-profit bodies. It would leave the development of those lands to local authorities and, in an important point, prevent the Land Development Agency from essentially operating as a commercial entity.

This speaks to a major concern that we have about the conception that the Government has about the Land Development Agency. I remember the debates about the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, what the agency would achieve and why it was such a good idea. As time went on, it became increasingly apparent that NAMA had a problem with delivery. Some of us did not like the idea of NAMA in the first place but we thought it could and should have helped to deliver public and affordable housing in its large property portfolio. When representatives of NAMA came before the finance committee, they used to say, basically, that was not their mandate. It may have been a subsidiary objective way down its list of priorities to identify some houses for public housing and in the end only approximately 2,000 properties were transferred to local authorities.

By and large, NAMA's mandate was set from the outset and it was to recover the money put into it. Therefore, it had an interest in reinflating the property market. The consequence of that has turned out to be quite disastrous. NAMA can now turn around and say it has generated so many billions of euro, with a surplus over and above what was projected. Taking this in the round, however, what has the consequence been? Much of the land it disposed of has been handed over to private agents with no interest whatever in developing the public and affordable housing we need but they have played a very significant part in driving up the cost of housing to the current unaffordable levels. That was hardwired into the mandate set down in the first place and to my mind there is a similar problem with the Land Development Agency. What goes into or does not go into the legislation will, essentially, determine the outcome of the Land Development Agency.

This relates to the debate we had earlier about the guillotine and so on. Deputy McAuliffe has said we discussed these matters on Committee Stage and it therefore does not matter that there is a guillotine on Report Stage. I am sorry but there is a legislative process. The entire point of the discussion on Committee Stage is to take on board each other's points about amendments and different sections in the Bill before formulating further amendments on Report Stage based on that discussion. Most of our amendments will not be reached, although all the Minister's amendments will be accepted once the guillotine comes down. That is truth. Some of the key matters that should be scrutinised will not be examined.

Many of us want to ring the alarm bells about this. There has not been enough digging into the detail in public discourse and debate on this. We did this on Committee Stage to some degree but to be honest there is still much confusion about what the Land Development Agency is going to do. One of our key concerns, which some of the amendments are trying to nullify, is the possibility that the Land Development Agency will engage in commercial activities. That is not its job but the legislation allows it to do it. It is just like NAMA ended up essentially operating as a sort of business that was trying to recover its investment and generate a surplus, despite that having quite dire consequences in the wider housing market. It essentially handed back control of the land bank suitable for development of houses to the big investment funds that bought up all those portfolios from NAMA.

This group of amendments also requires that the purpose of the Bill is to deliver solely public and affordable housing, limiting the role of the agency to making land available to local authorities in order that they can provide public and affordable housing. The amendments would ensure the LDA will be fully publicly owned and controlled. Currently it would be publicly owned but not publicly controlled. The problem with many quangos is they are publicly owned but not publicly controlled.

There are questions of commercial sensitivity because of deals with private finance and so on and we cannot find out what is being done when such bodies operate to a different set of objectives and priorities to what might be set by local authorities or communities according to their needs. They are always looking to the deals being done with private finance, which completely distort what the objectives of such an agency should be. This moves the purpose of a body like this away from what it could and should be doing, which is to aggressively assemble the land we need and servicing local authorities in delivering public housing, as they have always done in the past.

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