The Minister had a lot to say about what would be happening in a very short time. That was not today or yesterday, but none of the things the Minister then spoke about has materialised. However, to get back to the prototype houses, the suggestion that this is a good idea should be examined very closely. The general idea is that the second storey of these two-floor houses should be left undeveloped, left bare, and that the householder could later develop that floor, dividing it into rooms to make the house into a four-room or five-room structure. If a young man with, say, two in family, goes into one of these houses, by the time his family increases in the normal way he will be up to his eyes in debt—if he is not, he will not be as others are— and it is therefore foolish to suggest that he will be in a position to develop the remaining portion of the house. I ask the Minister to have another look at this. Even if such a man found it financially within his means to enlarge his house or to develop an undeveloped portion of it, he would find it would cost him twice or three times as much as if it had been done when the house was built. According to the Department this is good economics but I do not agree. I do not think it will work.
Previous speakers have dealt with housing in the city here that I do not propose to spend much time on it. We will be hearing a lot more about it during the Dublin south-west by-election campaign. I am sure the people there will have all the propaganda. On the question of private house building, the Minister said he proposes to reduce the ground space for grant purposes and, indeed, for the purpose of rates remission. He also proposes to put a ceiling of £6,000 on the cost of houses to qualify. The Minister has only to draw his breath for a couple of months and it will be difficult to get any house built for less than £5,000 or £6,000. One must realise that sites even a long way from Dublin have increased in price to between £750 and £1,000 per site. If you add that to the cost of erecting a house you will soon reach the £6,000. Although it may be a good idea to exclude the luxury type house from grants, we hope it will not lead us to the spectacle of little boxes all over the place. There is a grave danger something like that will happen.
A number of people are at present building fairly sizeable housing schemes. I am quite sure the Minister will take the people who have got permission into consideration. One man who has got permission for a 200 houses scheme has the first 60 of them under way. The cost of these houses is over £6,000. If this man is not able to get the rates remission or if the grant is cut because of the cost of the house, he stands to lose a substantial amount. He is not in a big way and it would be a pity that this should happen to him. The area in which he is carrying out the development is one that could do with it.
There is the suggestion that houses to be built in future should be limited in floor space to 1,249 square feet for certain purposes. I agree that the idea of removing the walls for the purpose of having the floors measured is good. While many people who have been building relatively small houses had the floor space higher than the minimum laid down, because the floor space to qualify had to be within the rooms themselves and the kitchen, the bathroom or scullery was not counted as a room, at the same time, there is a danger here that it will have the exact opposite effect. The Minister must realise that he is having a two-way bang at the grants. First, he reduces the maximum floor space to 1,249 square feet. If that was confined to the rooms alone, it would still leave fairly sizeable rooms but, because he is including the rooms it is very much more of a reduction than would at first appear. I hope that is not too complicated. I am sure the Minister or his experts will work that one out fairly quickly. The other matter is the date on which it will be operative. Quite a number of people have paid architect's fees and some have got permission to build a house. Some have the plans ready. If a date is fixed and if these people are ruled out for grant purposes and rates remission, the effect will be very serious.
I agree with Deputy Healy that a number of contractors have been collaring the Government part of the grant themselves by adding it on to the purchase price. Some of them have the audacity to quote, say, £3,500 for a house and then, when the house is halfway up, they blandly point out that, in addition, they are entitled to, and intend to take, the Government part of the grant. Any steps the Minister can take to prevent this should be encouraged. At the same time, I do not know whether or not simply wiping it out in certain circumstances is the answer. I do not think it is.
In Finland some years ago there was a system of no grants but subsidised loans and 100 per cent of the cost of the house could be borrowed. The money normally paid as a grant is used to subsidise the loan interest. The people there considered it a much better idea than the kind of system we have here.
The Minister must face up to the situation where costs have gone so high now that the grants, even with the adjustment he suggests, are not realistic. He must take a hard look at this. The amount of the grant has not progressed with the increase in the price of houses. While he quotes figures of the increase in the number of private houses being built he should remember that, because of the extra cost, the money being made available will build far fewer houses. He refers to that point, in passing, in his brief.
We must continue to build new houses to meet the needs of those who, over the past number of years, needed a new house and also meet the needs of people who will, because of their desire for an improvement in their standard of living, require a new house.
Deputy Healy mentioned high-rise flats and I agree with his comments. It may be a cheaper way to provide accommodation to build these flats but while many of these people are glad to have a roof over their heads, they are not happy in high-rise flats—not because they are afraid of a gas explosion which might bring down the flats but because they feel shut off. On many occasions lifts have gone out of order and completely shut off people in the upper flats. One of the terrible things in modern days is that we have youths who feel it is fun to discommode other people. Because people live in a flat they cannot always allow their children to go out to play. This raises a serious social problem. It does not matter how nice the playground may be if the children cannot go down on their own and if the parents cannot go down with them. While we still have a substantial amount of open country, we should attempt to build at a reasonable height. High-rise flats might be all right in New York, for example, but they do not appear to be all right in Dublin.
Reconstruction grants are a very good idea. However, some inspectors have the idea that they are not doing their job if they examine an extra room which is being built or plastering, or new floors or windows, unless they examine the whole house. One man thought he would qualify for a grant of £140—and so he would, if he was prepared to spend £3,500 doing up the house. At that time he could have built a fairly good house for that. It was ridiculous for an inspector to make such a suggestion. Most inspectors, who look at a house and decide what, in reason, should be done, are very sensible men. A directive should be issued either by the Minister or his senior officers to these people who feel they should insist on the whole place being turned into tip-top order before a grant can be given. This means that people anxious to repair their dwelling finish up by living in a place which gradually becomes a hovel because they have not the necessary money. It is only reasonable that the Minister should do something about that.
There has been a recent epidemic of flu in this country and its impact has been felt in the Department as in other places. However, it does not explain the terribly long delays in this country in the payment of grants or in inspection for grant purposes. I find the inspectors and the staff in the housing section of the Minister's Department very reasonable and courteous people but courtesy, no matter how welcome, is no answer to the man whose supplier is looking for money from him. The job is done and the money cannot be paid. There seems to be no reason why the inspector should not go out and look at the job. If money is not going to be made available, a warning should be given by the Department before the situation I referred to is created. They should say "We are not likely to have money before X date and, therefore, you should not proceed with the job until then". It is unreasonable to have people pledging their credit, spending whatever money they have themselves to do a job and then finding they are being met by the contractor and the supplier for months on end with a request for the money due, when the only reason for non-payment of the account is that the grant was not paid to them. Sometimes we are told that the inspector has the file out, that he has not returned it, or has mislaid it, but a little more effort on the part of those people would probably solve the problem. Most of the people with whom I have had dealings in the Department are very courteous but they cannot pay grants until the reports are received.
Sometimes an inspector appears to be most unreasonable. I knew a case of a man who applied for a grant to build a bathroom. The house was not an ordinary stone or concrete block house; it was one that had been built with timber and it was sheeted with galvanize. Since timber structures now qualify for a grant I could not see anything wrong with it. The house was occupied by the man and his family and had been kept in good order. There was an outside dry toilet and he felt that, since there did not appear to be any chance of getting another house, he would build a bathroom. An inspector called and said a grant could not be given. However, I asked two qualified engineers to look at the house and both expressed the opinion that there was no reason for withholding the grant. The decision of the Department not to give this man a grant of £80 or £100 means that he cannot build a decent bathroom for his family. This is the sort of stupid approach that makes people say the Department of Local Government are not doing their job properly.
There is another aspect which the Minister might perhaps clarify for me. If somebody gets a grant for the reconstruction of a house he is not entitled to a second grant, other than in exceptional circumstances, for a period of 15 years. Suppose a person gets a grant of £70 instead of the normal £140, can the Minister tell me why he cannot qualify for the balance of the £140 if he subsequently decides to do some work within the 15 years that he had not originally thought he could do? The Department have on a number of occasions refused a second grant on the grounds that the person got a previous grant and that the 15 years had not expired. I know this is a matter of detail but possibly the Minister may not have heard of it before and he may be able to do something about it.
I heard Deputy Healy make an impassioned appeal for people who want to vest their houses, stating that everyone should be encouraged to do this. I think he said this with tongue in cheek because he is a most intelligent Deputy and knows the facts as well as I do. Does anyone seriously suggest that under the new renting system in respect of local authority houses tenants will rush to purchase their houses? Is it not a fact that, while under the old scheme the position was that tenants could vest their houses for less than two-thirds of the rent, the new scheme which the Minister's predecessor introduced insists that the subsidy must not be taken into consideration when vesting takes place? Therefore, a man who has a house for £1 per week finds that vesting will cost him between £2 and £3 per week and there are very few people who will be prepared to accept those terms, particularly people who are not in a very good financial position.
I heard Deputy Healy talking about a man in Cork who might have to pay up to £8 per week and he added "Of course, there is £60 a week going into that house and it is only right that the sons and daughters who are working should pay their share of the rent." I do not know if the Deputy has a grown-up family, but I think anyone here who has a grown-up family will agree with me that, far from paying a share of the rent, the young people are more likely to ask for a loan on Monday night. Young people nowadays are not going to take into consideration the question of rent and whether they should pay a fixed share of it so that the local authority can get £8 per week. To think otherwise is just not facing facts.
The question of the availability of building land was mentioned by the Minister and also by practically everyone who spoke here. This whole matter is tied up with planning. Town planning varies from one local authority area to the next. I find it most annoying that most local authorities try to ensure that there will not be any new houses on main or arterial roads and, having successfully moved people off these roads, they do their best to prevent them from building on county roads. The Minister must take a firm stand on this matter. I am aware of the fact that he has got before him dozens of applications from various counties from people who have been refused planning permission mainly on the ground that there are two or three houses with septic tanks in the area and that, therefore, no further houses will be allowed. It may not have got through to the people who make these decisions that the refusal of planning permission on one site immediately increases the value of another site and has resulted in some extraordinary situations. There are cases where, after half a dozen sites in an area had been refused planning permission, plots for which permission was obtained and which should have been sold for about £400 or £500 suddenly went up in value to £1,000, £1,200 or £1,500.
This is a matter on which the Minister can and should take a firm stand. The whole trouble is that people buying sites tend to get as much road frontage as possible. They then buy a rather short site and the result is that the septic tank is the minimum distance from the house. If they bought a narrower frontage and ran the site back a distance, as can be done in most cases, and put the septic tank well back, well spaced out from one site to the next so that they are not parallel, there would not be any difficulty. This is a matter with which only the Minister can deal because the local authority planners seem to have got themselves tied up about it and they cannot agree on the exact position.
The Minister says—and I agree with him—that the availability of sites is important but the only way to make plenty of sites available is to ensure that the sites put up for sale have planning permission. Against that we have a situation where the Minister has granted permission to a number of people on the Golf Links Road at Bettystown who had been refused permission by the Meath County Council. The reverse was the case there. Meath County Council refused permission because the ground was very wet and the septic tanks attached to the houses already built had been clogging up.
On one Christmas Eve, the local fire brigade had to go and pump out some of them in order to prevent a nuisance. Therefore, Meath County Council refused permission pending the erection of a new sewerage scheme in the area and everybody who applied to the Department for permission have been granted permission. I might add that most of them were not people who just wanted houses in which to live.
This brings me to the question of sewerage and water schemes. We, in County Meath, submitted schemes to the Minister's Department on separate lists but they were sent back saying that both sewerage and water schemes should be on the one list. We did this and we are now wondering what will happen and when we will get some indication to go ahead. It is all very well to look at the plans on a map. This may give local people the idea that they are getting something but it is very difficult to plan an area unless the dates for the start and finish of sewerage schemes are known beforehand.
In one particular case in Navan, where a water scheme was to go into operation and from which there were two extensions, the Minister's advisers told him that the two additional schemes should not be commenced until the main scheme was finished. The Meath county engineer had advised that the two additional schemes should start at the same time and, when the question was raised by me here, the Minister did look into the matter and sanctioned the carrying out of the three schemes at the one time and this saved several months delay. I thank the Minister for having done that because, if we are to be critical, we must also be fair about these matters.
There is also the question of group water schemes. I am not satisfied with the carrying out of these schemes. I suggested here, and Meath County Council agreed, that they should take over the schemes in Meath and complete them. If that were done the schemes would be up to the required standard.
