The Minister has called the ground upon which he wants to debate this. He talks about confidence. He expresses confidence in the steps taken by the Government to regulate housebuilding costs, and last night he spent most of his time raking over the coals of history. The Minister of State, who is leaving the Chamber now, talked about history repeating itself. Since the completion of the quotation is, "Once in tragedy and the second time in farce", I suggest to the Minister that I will deal with his record on the basis of what he and his colleague in Government do. If he wants to talk about the past let us swop places. I will go back to the Seanad, the Minister can come back to this side, and we will talk about what was happening in the past on that basis.
We are dealing with the here and now and with the promises of a Government who have a massive democratic mandate. The members of my party and I know what we did in Government and we make no apology for that. We are dealing now with the Minister who has responsibility for it, and he is asking us to express confidence in his ability and that of his Government to regulate house prices.
I do not believe it is possible to operate any governmental system without some attitude to social values, and in order to find that values system in the present Government I went sequentially through the documents that would be relevant to that. The manifesto upon which the Government obtained a mandate—though they had not indicated that they were going to change the name of the Department—contains a statement on page 26 which I quote:
A forward looking and socially committed Department will be the centre of our Local Government policy. An immediate injection of an extra £30 million for the building and construction industry will create 5,000 new jobs in the first year of Government. Because Fianna Fáil believes that as many families as possible should own their own homes, it will be made easier to buy a house and——
wait for this:
——cheaper to keep it.
That is what they said before they got in. In the White Paper National Development 1977-1980 the phraseology is pretty much the same. The priority of concern was also the same. “Infrastructure Development” is the title of section 5 on page 41 and we start, not with a socially committed Government or Department, but first the building industry, then housing, then private housing, and then local authority housing. On page 42, paragraph 5.7 they state under “Private Housing”:
It is the Government's policy to help and encourage as many as possible to provide their own homes. Finance for house purchase loans is now more readily available than it has been for a long time and interest rates generally are much lower. The new £1,000 grant for first time owner/occupiers of new houses will considerably ease the other major problem of potential house buyers, namely the raising of a deposit.
That should sound familiar. I continue:
The Government believe that in the period to 1980 private sector institutions must continue to provide the bulk of the mortgage finance needed for private house purchase.
Finally, in terms of getting some indication of what the Government's policy is, the Minister in his Estimate speech on 9 March reported in the Official Report, Volume 304, column 1227, stated, and I quote:
It is a basic tenet of the Government's housing policy that as many families as possible should be helped and encouraged to provide their own houses.
Not many people in this House would disagree with those suggestions, but we are being asked tonight, in effect, to express confidence in the Government's ability, through their policy of regulating housebuilding prices, to achieve the objectives outlined in those three statements which, taken sequentially, run over a period of approximately nine months.
What did we get last night from the mover of the amendment? We got nothing of that. We got figures. Now I am neither a Minister O'Donoghue nor a former Minister Garret FitzGerald. I have to see figures in black and white before I can do my sums fully, and I do not think I am abnormal in that regard. We did not get anything from the Government side or from the Minister that would give me any confidence to suggest that he has the ability to regulate house prices. We got no analysis of the housing market, no analysis of housing demand, no analysis of what the population increase is, of what the headship rate is, of what the regional breakdown of that headship rate is, of what the impact of that headship on a regional basis is likely to be in areas of rapid urban growth. Therefore we do not know in real terms what the demand is.
We know, taking a quotation from another section from the White Paper on national development that the estimates, going back to an NESC publication, talk in terms of something between 21,000 and 28,000 necessary to satisfy housing demand. I have seen a similar aggregate figure produced for the Dublin region expressed in terms of what Dublin Corporation and Dublin County Council refer to as the Dublin sub-region. I defy any public representative in this Chamber to relate the achievements of those aggregate figures to the endless housing queues that will arrive at any one of our clinics, and then to say to somebody, "You will be housed on the basis of aggregate demand being supplied. Mind you, it will not be on the basis that you need it, but it will be supplied nevertheless".
The words of the Government policy were about houses and homes. Making a house into a home needs a certain number of factors to be available, and I will return to that point. The Minister who moved this amendment gave us no analysis of what demand for housing is in real terms and no kind of breakdown of that demand. I would be the first to admit—with regret— that we did not have a 1976 census, the first figures of which would now be coming through and which would provide some of that. For a Government who are so full of ideas about creating new jobs something parallel to the 1975 Labour survey might have done this job and would have given us some indication—particularly in the key areas of growth which have already been identified—as to the real extent of the demand.
The Minister can come back to me on that and say that local authorities effectively, by processing their housing applications, have a fair assessment of what the housing demand is. I would say "Not so" if that is going to be the reply, because it is dealing with only one-third of satisfied demand at the best of times. If you take a figure of 24,000 houses, and indeed if you go to the figure that is likely to be built this year of 26,500, it is less than one-third. We are being asked by a Minister to vote confidence in him on the basis of his ability to regulate house prices. We get no profile in his speech of what the demand is.
The other component is the costs. We get no analysis of what constitutes housing costs or of the factors which go up to make them. There is more involved than merely the building costs. Last evening we were given figures in regard to the house building index but with respect I might say that we were not given much that made sense. Housing costs include the cost, self evidently, of land, labour and materials. In these days of increasing urbanisation and rapidly expanding suburbs there are involved also, if one talks about turning a house into a home, transport costs and the cost of providing neighbourhood facilities.
I would have thought that a Government that aspired to regulating building costs and to turning into reality the social objectives outlined in the manifesto and upheld in the national development plan, would at least begin to try to do the sums in regard to the costs involved. One would have thought that a Government that were so endowed with the benefit of a think-tank in Opposition plus the benefit of many years' administrative experience of Government would have been able to start attempting to assess what the real cost is of providing houses. I am not talking merely of four walls and a roof but of all the other factors such as serviced land, schools, churches, neighbourhood centres and so on.
In my innocence I asked a question of a Minister who, strangely, is very silent these days. Does anybody remember the Minister for Economic Planning and Development? I asked that saviour of the soldiers of destiny the following question as reported at column 1300 of the Official Report for 9 March:
.... if his Department have undertaken any studies whereby the cost of providing housing in expanded suburban areas can be properly compared with the cost of providing infill housing in existing built-up areas.
The Minister said that the reply was in the negative, and I shall not waste the time of the House repeating the remainder of his reply since most of the members were present then anyway. The Government do not know the relative cost in toto between suburban housing and infill city housing but they say that the high cost of inner city housing and the subsidies it entails must be subject to critical review, that the high cost of inner city housing cannot be carried on indefinitely. I could put on the record the precise wording from the White Paper but I shall not use my time in that manner.
I should be fascinated to hear the Minister tell us how it is proposed to have a critical review of something in respect of which the Government have not had the full picture. How can they review critically the cost of providing one form of housing as against another?