Paudie Coffey (Fine Gael)

The Minister of State will get an opportunity to respond later, but those are the figures we are being given for those on the social housing lists, and if they are accurate, we need to address them. According to the Minister of State's figures, more than 58,000 units have planning permission but have not yet commenced. If those units commence, it will obviously affect the matching of population projections with vacant houses and will need to be taken into account.

The Minister of State also mentioned NAMA. The agency is only taking account of the properties and developments valued at more than €5 million. There has been little debate about the smaller developers who may have built ten or 20 units in many towns and villages. They are not and will not be in NAMA because the agency is not designed to deal with those people. Many of those developers are in trouble. They have their small estates started but will not get them finished because those developers are either in financial trouble or bankrupt. There is a significant group unaffected by the NAMA or banking debates. Many of these small developers are in hock to the bankers and are not being taken into account in the discussions of the billions of euro worth of developer assets being taken over by NAMA. There is a raft of smaller housing estates and units that will need to be addressed in the future but have not been mentioned in debate up to now.

The main problem with unfinished estates relates to the issue of health and safety. There are open manholes, ducting, broken footpaths, uneven surfaces and access to houses with no roofs, floors or stairs. They are of major concern to the residents living adjacent to them or in the local communities. That is the real challenge facing us. Last week I saw one of these unfinished estates in Waterford city on which I compliment the local authority and the developer. They tidied up the estate and screened off the area making access to unfinished areas impossible to the people living adjacent to it. The area was landscaped and it was quite a good job. Driving past it, while one would know it was an unfinished estate, it was safe and did not allow access to the public, especially children. I hope the developer and the local authority will at a future date get to develop it. It is a pity that model is not used in other estates. Even if money is not available for the major works, at the very least the area should be screened off, landscaped and made safe until the money is available and the solutions found. The Minister of State should issue a directive or guideline to all local authorities to ensure that is done. This may be the vehicle that might be used, as the Minister of State proposes.

We need to find solutions and I do not want to be totally negative. It behoves Members of all parties to find solutions to the crisis in which we find ourselves. I read the national housing development survey which seems to have engaged most of the stakeholders who should be involved. The employment agencies, including FÁS and the colleges, should be engaged because they deal every day with thousands of unemployed construction workers. Small estates of approximately ten houses could be ring-fenced in a local authority area and a team of unemployed construction workers could be put together under a proper system of health and safety. With a proper foreman and the appropriate number of craftsmen, apprentices could be put into a ring-fenced site to finish those houses. There is considerable potential if we think outside the box and not simply put the work out to public tender to the large construction firms. In the small communities we can put construction teams of various abilities in the trades together to finish these houses and then, one would hope, sub-let them to tenants. Even with vacant local authority houses one will often hear housing officers saying they do not have the staff or resources to refurbish such existing stock to re-let them. Perhaps the Minister of State would draw attention to that area. On the one hand there are people on the housing list and, on the other, there are vacant local authority housing units which, we are told, local authorities do not have the manpower to renovate, refurbish and re-let. Surely we should engage with the employment agencies to get people off the dole to refurbish those houses.

I have some concerns about the re-letting of some of these unfinished estates, which might have never been fit for habitation in the first place given that they are in remote areas that are not near services and schools. We need to be careful not to ask local authorities to house people in such areas without services and schools. The principle of Part V of the Planning and Development Act 2000 was to integrate social housing into mainstream private housing close to services. We could be at a critical juncture in trying to house people in remote estates with few if any services. These are people who are already socially disadvantaged. We need be very cautious not to put social housing projects in remote areas, which would be a retrograde step. We all acknowledge that we have an overhang in the housing market. Many of us know how we got here and the blame game goes on. We should have an independent inquiry across the areas of governance, regulation and planning to allow us once and for all to draw a line under the property bubble which we hope will not happen again. We have many lessons to learn.

We on this side of the House are certainly interested in working to find solutions. We have representatives on local authorities who are screaming out for solutions and we should engage on that basis.