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

In some ways, this is a formality we go through at the end of each year. As I understand it, it is the final authorisation of the expenditure of money throughout the year and of money that will be carried over that has not been spent. It is an opportunity to dwell a little bit on the issue of the expenditure of the enormous amount of public money totalling €86 billion. It is the public's money and it is an extraordinary fact, with this record level of expenditure, we can still be in a situation where we have more than 100,000 people on housing waiting lists, huge numbers of people are not eligible to be on social housing waiting lists because their income is too high, but they also cannot access affordable housing, almost 1 million people are on hospital waiting lists, people are crowded on trolleys in our public health service and 110,000 children with special needs are waiting for therapies and services. Vulnerable children who need those services are waiting years. I could go on about the failure to deliver for many people with this enormous amount of money on basics such as housing, health and services for vulnerable children with special needs and those with disabilities. Some of that is about having to spend more money, but some of it has to be questioned. Are we getting the best value for the money we are spending?

I certainly want to take this opportunity to make a point to the Minister and to anyone serious about trying to address some of those big problems. The Government produced a report about construction costs - I think it was done by people in The Housing Agency - which came out at the end of September. The Minister may be familiar with it. It made for sober reading in that it showed that currently an semi-detached house on an estate is being delivered at €450,000 for a new build, apartments at €550,000 and suburban apartments at €590,000. That is a high price for something we absolutely need but it is clearly unaffordable for a huge number of the people who need the housing. That is a demonstration of significant market failure and the inability of the market to deliver housing at an affordable level. This is relevant to the expenditure of public money because a huge volume of the housing the State has delivered has been purchased from private builders. To address an existential and urgent housing crisis, I have actively campaigned for the State to do that. It should buy houses when it has not built them. I would prefer if it was building them in the numbers necessary, but I am in favour of us buying them to make up the deficit because we need social and affordable housing. However, it should be obvious that we could be getting a lot more social and affordable housing if we could deliver the houses more cheaply than the private market is capable of delivering them. That is why there is a serious - I am convinced of this and I would like to convince this House and whatever Government comes in - need for a State construction company and it could deliver housing more cheaply. Why? Even the biggest builders in the country do not have the scale necessary to deliver the sort of housing output the Government now accepts we have to get to. It is double the number Housing for All originally proposed, 50,000, 60,000 or perhaps 70,000 houses per year.

Even if the private sector wanted to, or was able to, it clearly does not have the capacity. Between them, Cairn and Glenveagh deliver 2,500 houses in a year. They are the biggest builders, with approximately 350 people working for them, but they are just not big enough. They do not have the scale to do what is necessary and they are clearly not able to deliver the houses at affordable prices, even for the State or for individual buyers.

What we need is to have a company of scale that controls the land bank so that it is not subject to speculation. When we break down the construction cost of housing, a very large part of the cost relates to land. The study I mentioned estimates about €70,000 of the enormous cost is for land. Much of that is because of the speculation by private developers who own the land bank, who flip it and so on. We must strip out that. The report also estimates that about €40,000 of the price relates to the profit margin of the developer. It also adds in a significant cost for the cost of finance, in other words, the profits of the banks. We can also add in sales and marketing. Consultants are often brought in who charge large amounts of money to do the sales and marketing for these developments.

We can strip out all of those things and get the economies of scale that a construction company the size of the ESB, which has 8,000 workers, can provide. State enterprises can work. The ESB is a world-beating company. It charges too much for its electricity, but that is because of deregulation. Historically, it has been a success story of State enterprise. We should have a State construction company on the scale of the ESB building on a not-for-profit basis, with a land bank and its own construction capacity. We could slash the cost of housing and consequently get more housing for the billions that are being spent in order to deliver the housing we need. The Government should seriously think about that. We electrified and transformed this country with the ESB, a State not-for-profit enterprise, and we must do the same in order to build social and affordable homes as well as for the necessary retrofitting of homes and to put in place necessary water infrastructure.

In my area - this is replicated all over the country - there are sites on zoned land in public ownership in Old Connaught in Rathmichael where they have not even put in the water infrastructure yet. This is happening everywhere else too. It is absolutely insane. We must have the capacity to do this. We could do it cheaply and with the urgency and focus that is required if we had some control over the land bank and when and what we build.

That is my pitch for a State construction company. We will be very actively campaigning on that because we think we cannot solve the housing crisis unless we begin to move in that direction because we are facing massive market failure when it comes to housing. It must be capable of delivering the numbers required and at the right price. Even if the market delivers housing, the price is just too high and there is no sign that it is going to come down.

There are a few last points I want to make. There was an overrun in sports of €24 million not spent. This year we had a fantastic run-out in sports, especially at the Olympics. In my area, the whole borough is full of pride for Jack Marley, who fought in the Olympics in the heavyweight division and got to the quarter finals. A young woman, Robin O'Reilly, got to the European championships in boxing also. We have had a fantastic level of new involvement in sports - in soccer and GAA. There is a fantastic growth in young people getting involved in sports, in particular young women. Every single club I know is crying out for all-weather pitches, clubhouses and basic facilities. There are just not enough of them. While there have been some new facilities, they are not nearly on the scale necessary to meet the demand of young people. Sport is important. When we look at the success in the Olympics and in the Paralympics, we can see what our young people can achieve if we provide them with the facilities. It might help the Irish soccer team improve its fortunes if at a grassroots level we proactively put money into providing the facilities, pitches, clubhouses and all the other equipment necessary to facilitate young people to excel in sport. That €24 million could go a long way. We should think about that, but we also need to significantly increase the amount of money we put into grassroots sports for young people and in local communities.

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