Mary Fitzpatrick (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for coming into the House with the Land Development Agency Bill 2021, which the Fianna Fáil Party is obviously supporting. It reflects the result of the general election in 2020 when people voted for change, and particularly for change in the Government's and State's role in the provision of housing. The electorate then quite legitimately asked why we have such a housing crisis of supply and affordability when we have so much land; why the State is not providing affordable homes; why local authorities are not empowered to deliver affordable homes; and why they are not providing affordable homes both to purchase and rent.

I am delighted to say the Affordable Housing Bill 2021 passed in the Dáil yesterday with cross-party support, albeit that the Social Democrats and a small minority of others for some reason did not support the provision of affordable housing by the State.I commend all the other parties and Independents who supported the Affordable Housing Bill, which is the most comprehensive affordable housing Bill in the history of the State. The Land Development Agency will be put on a statutory footing once this Bill is passed and it will be charged with assembling and managing productively all State-owned lands. As others have said, the database it has been compiling is impressive. It exposes the extent of available lands to the State that are not in productive use for the provision of affordable housing. We are determined to reverse that situation. We will reverse it through the Affordable Housing Bill and the Land Development Agency Bill. I very much welcome the commitment to 100% public housing on the public lands that are being identified as being suitable for housing in Dublin and Cork and a minimum of 70% social and affordable housing in every other location. That is important. It was not good enough for us to give the local authorities the power to deliver affordable homes to purchase and rent alone. We need to support them by ensuring any of the available lands have a designation for affordability and for public housing.

The fact that the Land Development Agency initially will have €1.25 billion of capital gives it a good working capital base and there is the potential to increase that up to €2.5 billion. Senator Cummins has already mentioned that scale is important. There are nine sites and 4,000 houses already in train, which is welcome, but we need housing on massive scale and housing on a significant scale within the next 12 to 24 months and beyond.

It is welcome the Land Development Agency is being set up as a development agency. I have seen in my constituency the way a development agency such as the Grangegorman Development Agency was able to assemble lands. In that instance, it was HSE lands and city council lands and it is now a world-class leading university campus. The Land Development Agency as a development agency will have similar powers but, critically, it will not have planning powers. That is important also. We have spoken about the powers of elected members to our local authorities. We have also spoken a great deal about the powers we are giving them under the planning and development Bill to control the making of their development plans. In their development plans they get to determine what lands are zoned for housing, recreational, industrial and other uses. Our local authority members are those who are closest to their communities. They are the people who understand best what their community needs in terms of housing. It is the local authorities, if we are all honest about it, that have the tradition of providing housing not only for those who need it most but for their own communities. It is important that under the development plans, our local authority members will determine how lands will be used in each local authority area. This legislation will then further determine other State-owned lands as held by the Departments of Defence, Education or Justice and will ensure that in Dublin and Cork, it will be 100% social and affordable housing. The development agency, as has been demonstrated in Shanganagh, will work to support local authorities where they have designated and zoned their own lands for housing and will provide them with expertise and capacity, which is important. I speak as a former local authority member who has been greatly frustrated by the fact that local authorities were not previously empowered to deliver affordable housing. Now that they will have the power to deliver affordable purchase and cost rental housing, our elected local authority members are both ambitious and capable of delivering for their communities. I believe this agency can help them.

I want to refer specifically to section 183. The president of the Association of Irish Local Government, AILG, Mary Hoade, made a comprehensive presentation to the Oireachtas joint committee. That association demonstrated how close its members are to their communities. They argued strongly for the removal of section 183. We have all spoken to the Minister of State and I know all my Fianna Fáil colleagues have spoken to him and to the Minister, Deputy Darragh O’Brien, on this issue.It remains a significant point of contention for us. We accept section 183 is only being removed when it comes to lands zoned for housing and that it will not apply to every other piece of land designated and zoned in a development plan. We strongly believe, and want to see it in the legislation or in the regulations, that if lands are transferred without applying section 183, a timescale should be put on the Land Development Agency to deliver housing on those lands. That is the only reasonable approach. It is the only acceptable approach for our local authority members. I ask the Minister of State to come back to me on that point.

We support the Land Development Agency. It has significant potential. It will be accountable to the Oireachtas and its committees and to the Minister of State and the Government. It has adequate funding to commence with but we want there to be scaling up of development and for the agency to be ambitious. We want to ensure our local authority members are supported and resourced in order that they can use the Affordable Housing Bill and the Land Development Agency's capacity to deliver in every local authority around the country.