Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit arís go dtí an Teach. I broadly support this Bill, as I did the recent Affordable Housing Bill. As I said then, the scale of the housing problem is such that the Oireachtas should be willing to make serious direct interventions to tackle it, and to give the Government the benefit of the doubt when it seeks to do so.

The Bill establishes the Land Development Agency as a commercial State entity. Its objective will be to assemble land for development and to utilise State and public lands properly, and, using that land, to implement the affordable purchase and cost-rental schemes envisaged under the Affordable Housing Bill. I support all of these aims.

This Bill has proved controversial, not least among city and county councils and councillors themselves. Legitimate concerns have been expressed that it represents a further erosion of local democracy, taking reserved functions out of the hands of councillors. There are also concerns about the accountability and transparency of how the agency will operate, and whether oversight by the Ministers with responsibility for housing and public expenditure is sufficient. In a way, these concerns mirror those expressed at the time of the establishment of NAMA in 2009, another agency that was taking major decisions in the public interest, albeit on an infinitely larger scale.

I share all of these concerns. What we need is more local democracy and more decisions made locally in the communities affected by them but the reality is that many councils have repeatedly failed to address adequately the housing problem in their functional areas. The failings of Dublin City Council in this regard are nothing short of appalling for the local authority of a modern European city. That council seems to spend most of its time debating whether to display the Palestinian flag, or vanity projects such as the white-water rafting white elephant, or pie in the sky issues such as a four-day working week for its staff, which was the latest flight of fancy discussed at its meeting this week. This is what is on the agenda of an elected local authority of a city that cannot adequately house its own population. Can we blame central government for intervening?

There are two primary reasons for the failures of local authorities in recent years. I say this with fraternal affection for my colleague, Senator Warfield. One reason is the deliberate obstruction of large-density housing projects by the Sinn Féin party. The party says that it is not doing so deliberately and cites what it says are legitimate objections each time. However, the reality is that no matter what the project, Sinn Féin councillors always manage to find reasons to oppose it.The developments are either too large or too small, or they do not have enough social housing, or they are the wrong mix, or there are objections to the use of publicly-owned land by private developers, and so on ad infinitum. Even Goldilocks found a bowl of porridge to suit her eventually. It is impossible to accept that these are genuine objections and not part of a deliberate and concerted strategy to prolong the housing crisis for political gain. I have a funny feeling that if Sinn Féin were elected to government in the near future, new orders will be issued - and many new orders I might worry about - to its councillors by the armchair generals, and we would see a sudden increase in the number of developments being approved.

The greatest reason for the dysfunction of local government are the so-called reforms of the system rammed through by the Fine Gael-Labour Party coalition in 2014. The amusingly-titled Putting People First plan, implemented in the Local Government Reform Act 2014, slashed and burned town councils, reduced the number of local representatives and rebranded city and county managers as chief executives. The net effect was to continue the centralisation of power in unelected management and to continue the paralysis in decision-making. Having failed to improve the effectiveness of local government in the last attempt, these problems will just not be solved in the short term. While I accept the concerns raised by councillors about the lack of oversight and the usurpation of their powers, the nature of the housing shortage is such that we urgently need to take bold steps and soon.

As the Bill aims to increase the availability of land for housing, I want to raise an issue I have raised several times in recent weeks, namely, the vacant site levy. I have submitted an amendment to the Bill for Committee Stage and I pressed a similar amendment during Report Stage of the Affordable Housing Bill. The vacant site levy is not working. It is not generating any revenue worth talking about for councils and nor is it freeing up land for development. Meanwhile, there are many vacant sites that are not being registered or levied because the rules on what qualifies as a vacant site are so complicated and vague, leading some councils to not even try to implement it.

The Minister has a lot to think about these days so I will just remind him that what I have been proposing is that we simplify the operation of the levy by introducing an element of self-assessment, placing an onus on landowners to register their own sites, and by bringing within the definition of a vacant site properties on which planning permission for the development of multiple residential units had been granted but where development has not commenced. This would help get a more effective vacant site levy. It would help lead to more sites being developed. This is the kind of proposal that could have broad cross-party support. I acknowledge that on Report Stage of the Affordable Housing Bill in this House, the Minister of State said a wider review of the levy is under way and he assured me that proposals such as that which I put forward would form part of that review and I welcomed it. I intend to keep the issue on the agenda, however.