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

I am happy enough to support this extra capital going towards the LDA, but I would rather that the LDA were something other than what it is. We have argued for some time it should be a fully fledged State construction company. That is the only way we will reach the level of output of social and affordable housing necessary to address the absolutely dire housing crisis we are facing. The LDA will probably need a lot more than the Government is currently proposing to put into it. I am interested in hearing the answers to Deputy Ó Broin's questions on what actual firepower it has to do what it claims it will do.

The LDA's record is not great so far, as far I am concerned. It was set up in 2018 and legislated for in 2021. It has delivered approximately, and the Minister of State will confirm this, 1,000 units in that time. It is not great, when we consider there are in reality, when we take all the HAP transfer lists and so on, well in excess of 100,000 households still on the social housing list. There are many tens of thousands of people who cannot afford private market prices, be they rent or purchase prices, but who are not eligible for social housing because they are over the threshold and, therefore, need cost rental or genuinely affordable purchase. A thousand units since 2018 is not great. Again, the Minister of State can confirm precisely what he thinks the LDA will do but as I understand it, its target is to get 14,000 homes built between 2024 and 2028.

That is against the background of the scale of what we actually need. We still have not get the revised targets following the Housing Commission report, which finally confirmed what many of us have been saying for a long time; that the Housing for All targets were woefully inadequate and roughly half of what we actually need. We will have to double the targets. Some 60,000 to 70,000 houses a year will be necessary to meet the targets and, as the Housing Commission also stated, we need to dramatically increase the proportion of housing that is social and affordable. That should be fairly obvious in that current market prices are too expensive for probably 60% to 70% of ordinary working people. You would want to be in the top 20% or 30% of earners to afford what is out there in the market.

In some shape or form, we will need to subsidise more than half, probably around 60%, of the housing that will be constructed. That is my estimate. It will either have to be social or affordable. That means more than doubling the Housing for All social and affordable housing targets. How will that be done? Cairn Homes and Glenveagh will not do it. They are just not big enough. The few big firms, and they are not that big but are pretty small really, do not have the construction capacity to build what we need to build. Most of our builders are small builders. It seems obvious to me that unless we establish a construction company, and the only one who will do that is the State because who else will do it, that really has scale and can get economies of scale to build on the level of the 30,000 to 35,000 social and affordable houses we need, we will not solve this housing crisis. That is what should be going on.

To my mind, that means a hell of a lot more investment and it means expanding the LDA to have its own workforce of direct labour units, and to be directly involved in the training of apprentices and scaling up the training. People say it takes time to get people trained in the trades. That is true, but apprentices go on site in year one. Once you start to recruit large numbers of apprentices, you have people on site. Apprentices should be paid a bit better than they are now. They are on sub-minimum wage in years one and two, but we should pay them decently and make it attractive to work for a State construction company. We should to start to think about a State construction company that looks a little like the ESB, where there were jobs people wanted. If these were good, well-paid jobs, where they were going to get a pension, that would be an attractive option to bring young people into a construction company that could build the social and affordable housing we need at scale. A State construction company would cut out the profit margins, which add to the cost private companies inevitably impose in any project.

When I look at the prices of the stuff the Government has delivered, I am not optimistic as to the extent to which it will help many of the cohorts it is meant to help. Shanganagh, in my area, is the biggest delivery the LDA has completed or almost completed. It comprises 600 houses. We fought long and hard to get that site developed for social and affordable housing. We had to fight against the original plans for some of it to be private. We eventually won the argument that it should be all social and affordable housing. The first units have been delivered there now, which I am delighted to see. The social units are being allocated, which is fantastic. The people moving into them are absolutely delighted. However, only a third of the 600 are social units. There are no houses; they are all apartments. I am not saying there is anything wrong with apartments, but it is interesting that none of the houses being built are social units. Already, there is that kind of segregation being built into the development, which is just wrong. It is plain wrong. The prices are not terribly affordable, starting at €330,000. I understand that for a relatively small sum we could have knocked another 10% off those prices. Maybe the Minister of State knows a bit about that. The figure I heard floating around was that for an extra €1 million or so, we could have brought those prices down to approximately €300,000. Instead, they are €330,000. What that means is single-income working families would have to be earning a lot of money - more than €80,000 a year. That is also true of the cost-rental homes, which are €1,200 a month for a one-bedroom unit and €1,500 a month for a two-bedroom unit. That is not cheap. It is cheaper than the absolutely insane market in our area, where it is €2,500 a month, but it is not cheap for a single earner. An outdoor council worker, for example, is not going to be able to afford €1,200 a month on his or her own. There is no way that person is going to be able to afford that, but he or she may well be over the threshold for social housing. That person is banjaxed. The rents for the cost-rental units are too high and that is because the LDA is still, to a very significant degree, benchmarking against the private market. Even where it is a discount on the private market, its benchmarking or starting point is a relationship with the private market, rather than what is actually affordable for people.

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