Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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2. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government his plans to direct local authorities to sell public land at low or below market rates as part of pillar 3 of his housing action plan; the public sites currently under consideration for such sale; the total hectarage of these sites; the number of houses that will be provided at these locations; the percentage of these houses that will be social housing; the timeframe for providing these units; and the cost to the State arising from the low or below market sale of these lands. [35578/16]

Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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The housing action plan refers to the potential for providing low-cost lands to private developers for the provision of private units at affordable costs. Last week, following the launch of pillar 3, there was media speculation about the low-cost sale of lands to private developers. The Department's website features a speech given by the Minister when he announced the 19 potential pathfinder sites. As it does not provide much detail, the purpose of my question is to elicit as much detail on this aspect of the plan as the Minister is able to provide today.

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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That is a fair question. Rebuilding Ireland's core objective is to increase and accelerate housing delivery to meet demand.

In the context of State lands, that means extracting the optimum housing supply in the shortest possible timeframe, while also securing the greatest value for money possible in terms of State-owned assets. In practical terms, this will include accelerating social housing delivery and securing more homes for sale and rent at lower and more affordable price points.

Many local authorities have significant landbanks and are pivotal in managing the overall planning and development of housing to meet the needs of citizens. It is not my intention to direct local authorities on how to maximise the housing supply from their sites but, rather, to work with them in partnership, using all of the levers available to me, to support the development of housing on such sites.

In this regard, Rebuilding Ireland contains a number of key actions that are capable of supporting the accelerated delivery of mixed-tenure housing from local authority sites. These include the commitment to spend over €5 billion on adding a significant number of social housing units to our existing stock, the €200 million local infrastructure housing activation fund and the major urban housing development sites initiative, which involves some local authority-owned and private sites. I hope we will get significant and ambitious public private partnerships in order to get mixed-tenure sites moving. This will be done on a case-by-case basis.

In principle, we have agreed politically on O'Devaney Gardens. We want to bring finance to the project to support 30% social housing. We also want Dublin City Council to try to design a system that can attract significant private sector interest in the site and to use the land that is available, which is the key to ensuring that the council receives as much of a dividend as possible from the private developer. It may be a social as well as a financial dividend, or one or other, in terms of the 20% affordable rental element of the project that we envisage.

Depending on the location and value of a site, the last thing we want are large sites remaining empty for five or six years when the current pressures on supply continue. We are encouraging the chief executives of local authorities to be ambitious and to come to us with projects that we will help them put together.

Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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As the Minister knows, we support the principle of mixed-tenure estates and want public landbanks used to the maximum public housing benefit possible. I urge that there be the greatest degree of flexibility possible from the Minister's Department in terms of the proposals chief executives bring forward. Different local authorities have different landbanks and sets of needs. In the case of O'Devaney Gardens, for example, Dublin City Council has other land that can produce other mixed-tenure sites, possibly under a similar model.

In my constituency, the bulk of the Clonburris strategic development zone, SDZ, land is private, but the Grange, or the Corkagh site on the Minister's list, is one of the last major publicly-owned pieces of land for social housing. If we do not get that process right, it will reduce the overall increase in social housing we are able to develop in an area of very high need. I would be interested in hearing whether the Minister is open to the idea of council-led mixed-tenure estates or the current proposal that the city manager of South Dublin County Council is considering in terms of the sale of land with the council receiving its full market value, the Department possibly funding the 30% social housing provision and the local authority being able to use the money from sale of the land to purchase further land in order to provide more mixed-development estates. That would be the most advantageous use of the land in the constituency.

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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That is a very fair point. Depending on where lands are located, the circumstances in the communities around them and so on, sometimes we need to actively try to get private housing in certain areas in order to create real mixed-tenure and broader communities - O'Devaney Gardens is a good example of that. In other areas, it may be sensible to have a higher percentage of social housing because there may already be a lot of private housing there.

It would be sensible of me to look to the experience within local authorities, which know their areas a lot better than I do, come back which proposals, vet them and have a robust discussion about ensuring that we derive maximum value from the relevant sites. We also need to try to meet the policy objectives of the Rebuilding Ireland plan, which aims to change the way in which we deliver social and affordable housing in terms of mixed-tenure and use, better design and building communities rather than simply building housing estates.

As I said, we are encouraging local authorities to work with our housing delivery unit and to be ambitious in respect of prospective projects. We have a lot of money to spend on housing next year, the year after and so on. We will be part of those projects but they need to make sense from a policy point of view.

Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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I thank the Minister. I acknowledge and welcome the flexibility he has outlined. I urge him to consider other areas of flexibility. I refer to the affordable or cost-rental element of some mixed-tenure estates. There is a real value in considering local authorities being responsible for cost rental or affordable rental schemes, partly because it would increase the rent paid to local authorities, which would assist them in meeting their commitments in respect of the long-term maintenance of the stock.

I refer to housing for sale. We know, from replies from the Department to parliamentary questions I submitted, that the all-in cost of local authority building for two or three-bedroom houses is significantly below that outlined in some surveys, such as the one carried out by the Institute of Chartered Surveyors. Therefore, there could equally be a benefit to local authorities and the State if the latter was in the business of providing affordable housing for sale that could be sold at below €200,000 or €220,000. That profit could be recycled back into future mixed-tenure housing developments. I am not saying that the Minister should consider the proposal instead of what clearly seems to be a more private sector focus. However, it is a model he should actively explore.

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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I do not have a closed mind. I find it difficult to believe that local authorities would be able to manage projects more efficiently than a competitive tendering process where a project goes to market and the person who produces the best and lowest cost proposal will be awarded the contract. Local authorities should be involved in the management of the process. By and large, however, the likelihood is that they will tender in order to try to get the best value, design and so on.

We should not forget that local authorities have not built many houses for quite some time. In terms of building up expertise and teams of architects, engineers, quantity surveyors and so on, they will be under a lot of pressure to get social housing projects built on time without taking on a lot of extra staff. If there are exceptions to that, if there is a good case being made, if chief executives think it is a good idea and if they are supported by councillors, we will consider the proposals so long as they are not a contravention of competition law.