Brian Stanley (Laois, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome this very important motion from the Labour Party. What we have had is the Government hoodwinking and misleading the people during the election campaign on a number of issues but spectacularly on housing. People were told that 40,000 homes would be delivered in 2024 when in fact the number was going to be 30,000. The facts were there to prove that. We have to increase supply. It must be doubled to meet demand and prices need to be brought down. The affordable home purchase scheme is in need of major reform. The terms of the scheme need to be more favourable for buyers and the supply needs to be increased. The structure of the scheme also needs to be changed because the approved housing bodies, AHBs, are not showing an interest in it. The Minister of State and his colleagues in government will find this out as the weeks and months go by. A very small number of them are coming onstream in County Laois and only a handful of cost rentals. However, this is nowhere near enough to meet the demand in towns such as Mountmellick, Portarlington, Abbeyleix, Mountrath, Portlaoise and Graiguecullen. We need to speed up deliver and reduce costs.

A lot of good proposals have been made this morning. I want to mention two briefly. The vacant site tax of 7% is not being implemented and it is not effective. It needs to be increased and acted upon. I do not support the zoned land tax on active farmland but a levy of 3% for zoned land tax is a laugh, for God's sake. It is simply not enough to incentivise people to not sit on land. This needs to be increased and enforced to have a real effect.

Regarding social and affordable housing, we need to speed up all form of delivery, including by the and private sector. That is why I mentioned the zoned land tax. For affordable and social housing we need to mass produce homes. I took this up with the senior staff in the Department of housing and local government during the previous Dáil. The Secretary General will say that standardised interior designs are being used. That is fine but if we are going to mass produce something, we need to bring down costs and speed up delivery. Anyone who has ever produced anything will tell you that what you do is mass produce. Do the people in Donegal really care if the house they are living in is going to look like one in counties Wexford or Laois or anywhere else?

That is how we delivered them in the 1930s and the 1970s. I am not arguing we should go back to 1970s- or 1930s-type housing, but what we can do is take the best examples and use them. I ask the Government to do that.

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