The failure to provide housing and thereby forcing people to live beyond their means, to save hundreds of pounds out of incomes of £20 a week or less and to make repayments at £5 or £7 a week when they should be getting houses to rent, is what I would call torture if I were in that unhappy position, which I am not, but that does not mean that I cannot have sympathy for those who are. The point I wish to make is that the rapid accumulation of applications on hand which shows the inadequacy of the present housing programme, both as regards the public and private sector leaves us in the position in which these applications total £22.9 million as against £17.1 million 15 months earlier.
Other relevant evidence here is the decline in the number of approvals of loans from these three sources, local authorities, insurance companies and building societies. The number has been falling sharply. It is this decline which is creating the backlog. If we take the last 12 month period for which figures are available—the 12 month period ended September, 1969 —as compared with the previous 12 month period, we find that the number of loans approved in total fell from 10,700 to 9,984. There is a 7 per cent drop in loan approvals in the latest 12 month period for which figures are available. It is that decline in loan approvals which is leading to this congestion and backlog in the private sector and which parallels the backlog in the public sector.
If we look at the number of loan applications on hand at the end of the relevant quarter, we find that in the two years ended September last, the number of loans on hand and unapproved has risen from 1,428 to 2,360, an increase of 70 per cent. If we break these figures down between the different sources we find that the accumulation of unapproved applications is concentrated largely in the local authority sector and, if we take the building societies and insurance companies together, we find there is an increase of about 24 per cent in unapproved loans. It is 80 per cent in the case of local authorities. The money which the Minister is unable to extort from the Minister for Finance is responsible for this. In two years unapproved loans have risen by 80 per cent.
These are formidable figures. They add to what I said yesterday when speaking about the inadequacy of public housing. What I am trying to show here is the appalling backlog of public housing which is growing all the time because the Government's housing programme is not keeping up with current demand, never mind reducing the backlog, and which is paralleled by and, indeed, is contributing to, a growing backlog in the private speculative sector where the resources available, particularly from local authorities rather than building societies or insurance companies, are so inadequate that the demand is building up all the time and more and more people are in the queue and the queue gets longer and longer. That is the situation at this point when, as I said at another stage, our national wealth is 45 per cent greater than at the period when we really had a housing programme at a level that has never since been attained under this Government, when we built 14,000 houses in one year, excluding conversions, 1,000 more than has been attained after, God help us, 13 years of Fianna Fáil rule.
Turning from that to some other related aspects of housing, turning away from the housing programme itself—I have said enough about that to establish where we stand—there are a couple of points that I should like to make about the housing programme which are perhaps less controversial and less critical but involving some criticism or, at least, some questions. The Minister, at column 596 refers to the encouragement he has given to local authorities to purchase land for housing purposes. He had a great deal to say about this—the third successive year in which £1 million was provided for this purpose. He mentions the number of sites available now as a result of this. He does not tell us how many of these are serviced or will be serviced in the foreseeable future. At least there are a very large number, many thousands of sites. I wonder am I right in thinking that the Corporation of Dublin under the Minister's appointee are now proposing to sell much of this land again to private builders? I understand this to be the case. There is, no doubt, an explanation, perhaps even a good explanation, of this, if the Minister would explain it to us. It seems a little odd to tell us at the length of several columns how much land the corporation have been buying for building but if they are now selling it again, or proposing to sell it, the Minister should make some mention of that fact. There may be good reasons for this. We should hear them.
I would have thought in these circumstances—I speak from ignorance of this subject and the Minister can guide me—that the corporation would make the sites available perhaps to private builders as well as having them for their own purposes without selling them, that they would at least retain ownership of the land and the ground rents that may flow from that. I am not quite sure why they should sell it to builders. I should like to know what provision there is to ensure that the developers of the land do not make a speculative profit from land they buy from the corporation. It would require very tight control of prices of houses to ensure that the prices of the house did not contain in respect of the land an element of profit on the purchase price paid to the corporation for land that the corporation bought some time ago. I am sure that, in fact, the Minister has given thought to this. I know he is concerned about this question of land values; indeed, I think our thoughts run on similar lines here, but I would just like to hear from him what, in fact, is his thinking on this subject and what are the safeguards that he has thought it necessary to invoke in this process of resale of land to builders which is taking place or about to take place to ensure that there is no danger of the public being in any way exploited and as to why he feels it necessary for the corporation to sell the land as distinct from making it available, while retaining ownership in it, to speculative builders.
On the question of land values, as I have said, I would go along with much of what the Minister said although the indefiniteness of his conclusions as to what action can be taken about it is a little bit disturbing especially as it has gone on so long. He refers, I think annually, in the debate in the Estimate to the various obstacles involved; that at first sight it might seem that the right thing is to nationalise land but that there are many obstacles involved, constitutional, legal, and so on. He has not, at least I do not recollect him doing so, explained in full the character of the constitutional obstacles. Personally I am less than convinced about this and I wonder whether the Minister's Department is not being unduly cautious in this matter and if there is no way in which they could establish whether there is or is not a constitutional obstacle.
The Minister in his speech seems to imply that the answer is that there is a constitutional obstacle so great that we have to find some way around it. He speaks of finding some other solution that will avoid the constitutional obstacle. I am not clear that there is such a constitutional obstacle. If there is, we should hear about it and the House should be given the opportunity of considering what action might need to be taken. I should like to know what advice the Minister has had that there is a constitutional obstacle, the nature of this obstacle and what might have to be done to remove it because I am not talking here of any mad socialist idea. I am not suggesting that all socialist ideas are mad or that any of them are but I am speaking of them in inverted commas. I am not speaking of ideas which the Minister might describe as mad socialist ideas. I am talking of the kind of situation which exists in Northern Ireland, which is not perhaps the most socialist country in western Europe. My understanding of it is that when the Craigavon town came to be developed the Northern Ireland Government purchased the land announcing their intention on a certain day that they would pay the current agricultural value of the land, not its developed value or value for development purposes. I believe there was agitation from the farmers and I believe the farmers did extract from the Minister a somewhat better price. But there was no constitutional obstacle there to the land being purchased at its agricultural value without any special profit accruing to the farmers because of the mere accident that they happened to own land which public authorities decided to use for development in the national interest.
Is it the case that our Constitution prevents us from acting in a manner which is thought not to be too revolutionary by that somewhat less than red Government in Belfast? Are we tied in some way by our Constitution that we cannot even take the kind of action which this Tory Government finds appropriate in Northern Ireland? If so, and if our Constitution contains a clause so extraordinarily conservative as to force us away from adopting the kind of procedure which that Government adopts as a matter of routine, then I think our people could be asked to change that clause in the Constitution. I am not at all convinced that there is this obstacle. I am not at all convinced that it is as serious as it is made out to be. I think, perhaps, the Minister's Department have been unduly cautious about it. I may be wrong in that. As we have not been told anything in details about this it is not easy to judge it, but the Minister will know that if he has a problem here he will get the co-operation of all sides of the House in dealing with it. We would not wish our Government to be prevented from acting in the way which is thought entirely appropriate even by the Tory Government in Belfast.
I do not think anyone will want to justify a situation in which individuals make large capital gains out of transactions in land or, indeed, out of the ownership of land which is used for housing purposes. Everyone has a right to be fairly compensated if his land is purchased. Indeed, I would hope that any compensation in a compulsory purchase would, if anything, err slightly on the side of generosity rather than leaving people with a feeling of grievance against the State for acquiring their property.
It is quite different if because a public authority decide to build a town or develop an existing town in a certain area the value of the land there in its present use is not alone paid but, on top of that, large capital gains accrue to the man who happens to own the land, not because he has done anything with it, not because he happens to own land which through a communal decision in the interests of the community is to be taken over for public purposes. That is unsatisfactory. I know the Minister is trying to do something about it, he has told us that, but I wonder if he is being radical enough about it. I wonder whether he is not being too hedged in by this constitutional obstacle. Either it is a real obstacle in which case we should know about it and try to resolve it, or it is not, in which case we should ignore it and get on with the job.
At column 585, if I can read my own writing, the Minister says that he is not happy that firms are doing enough to help their employees with their housing problems. I am sure he is right in this. There are some good examples. There are some firms who are doing something, but I wonder whether the existing encouragement given for this purpose is adequate. Could something be done by some kind of tax rebate to encourage firms to do a little more in the way of lending money for this purpose? There are firms which are at times liquid to the point where they can afford to lend some money to employees for housing purposes. Perhaps they could be given some little encouragement for this purpose.
The Building societies are given this kind of encouragement and an industrial firm or a commercial firm could be given it too. It might be of help. I am merely suggesting to the Minister that it might be worth looking at the question of whether he is right in saying that firms are not doing enough for their employees as regards housing—and I think he is—and whether there is anything he can do to give them an additional push in this direction by holding out some kind of carrot.
I want now to refer to the impact of housing on industry. The Minister referred to the fact that it is now possible to get a two-thirds subsidy for industrial housing. I think I am right in saying there has been a change here and this kind of change is welcome. I do not think we will solve the problem of industrial housing completely, despite the efforts of the National Building Agency and the changes the Minister has made, so long as we are in the position of having this enormous housing backlog. It is quite unsatisfactory that we should be in the position we seem to be in that, if an industry sets up somewhere and needs houses for workers, the local authority cannot do anything about it because they have so many people on their own lists and such a backlog that they must give them priority, and a separate scheme is needed to house industrial workers. The right answer here is to clear the backlog and have a single scheme for housing rather than two parallel schemes going on together.
More generally on the question of housing I would put the point which is included in the policy of this party that the present system on which the subsidisation of housing has to be undertaken by local authorities out of the rates is basically a bad system. I shall not go into the question of rates being a bad tax. This has been said repeatedly but we have not yet succeeded in doing anything about it. A system under which a local authority know that the more houses they build the bigger will be the burden on the ratepayers and the more unpopular will the members be with the local community, is designed to discourage adequate housing. I find it hard to believe there is not some connection between the fact that our public housing is at such a low level, half the rate per head in Northern Ireland and 40 per cent lower than it was 20 years ago, and the discouragement offered to the local authorities by the knowledge that the more houses they build the greater the burden will be on the rates.
It seems to me that the burden of subsidising housing is a Central Government responsibility, something which should be carried by Central Government. Indeed, I would like to see a situation in which local authorities would feel that the more houses they build, if they can get the capital to do so, the more they will, perhaps even marginally, improve their financial position and not disimprove it. In any system of financing it is important to have an incentive rather than a disincentive built in. I should like to feel that the local authorities were in a position to know that if they built houses they might make some profit— even £5 or £10, no matter how small— on each house they built rather than feel they are incurring a large and recurrent loss through having to subsidise the rents.
Subsidisation of rents is a matter of income supplementation. It is an essential Government responsibility. It is not something to be hived off piecemeal from one person to another or from Central Government to local government. The Central Government should deal with the whole question of income supplementation and ensuring that people have enough to live on, and the subsidisation of rents is part of this process. There are no rational grounds for hiving this off to local authorities and putting it on the rates. The problem of making the transition is, of course, clearly a difficult one. If we become members of the EEC, and if this leads to the introduction of a value added tax, and at some point in the future this value added tax is set and we are obliged to impose it at a level higher than its yield, perhaps significantly higher than the present turnover and wholesale taxes, that opportunity should certainly be taken to use this additional taxation to replace the rates. We may be forced willy-nilly to do this whether or not we want to. Certainly, if we are forced to increase taxation in that way as part of a harmonisation process in the EEC, we ought to take that opportunity to replace the rates system and that would give us the opportunity to make this transition to a system of housing subsidisation by central rather than local government.
The Minister made some reference to the rise in prices. I referred yesterday to his statement that the additional funds available could not keep up with this in the year ahead and therefore borrowing for housing would be reduced and all kinds of steps would have to be taken to try to mitigate the effects of that. This is very disturbing indeed. The figures which the Minister's Department give for house prices show an increase of 18 per cent in the 15 months ended September last. That is a fairly phenomenal rate of increase in average house prices. It may be, of course, that there was some change over that period in the quality or the size of houses or that the houses in the last period are not directly comparable with the houses in the first period. This may be the case but, even allowing for that, it seems a very big increase in the average cost per house. The Minister is right to be disturbed. He should also be disturbed by the remarkable disparities between the average cost of houses in different parts of the country. He will be aware that in Waterford the average price of a house is £3,962 in the latest period. In the rest of the country outside the major towns it is £4,014. In Dublin it is £5,243. That is a very big difference indeed. It is a difference of 30 per cent. I wonder has the Minister any idea how much of that is due to the cost of land becoming inflated because of the absence of serviced land as a result of the inadequacy of the planning in his Department over the past ten years.
I wonder also has the Minister any explanation to give of the fact that the cost of houses in Galway is so much higher than it is in Dublin. What is there about Galway that pushes house prices up so high, and indeed so rapidly? Is there some particular scheme going on in Galway, building larger houses than elsewhere? These are private speculative houses. The last figure we have for Galway is £5,372 per house. One could understand, although not accept or agree with, the fact that in Dublin house prices are higher than elsewhere because of land values. I should not have thought this was such a vital problem in Galway. I wonder whether the Minister has investigated this and whether he has any explanation to offer for the very high level of house costs in Galway as against other parts of the country. In fact, houses in Galway cost 17 per cent more than houses in Cork which has the next highest figure. This requires some explanation.
There are some other points to which I shall refer briefly. The Minister mentioned his intention to establish a national roads authority to look after arterial roads. This is a right decision. What I am not so sure about is that he is right to make this authority simply part of his Department. The kind of job to be done here is one preeminently suited, I would think, to the kind of State enterprise of which we have so many successful examples, many established by the present Government, many by a previous Government and many by the first Government. Why in this instance has he chosen—it is, I think, very much his personal decision—to adopt this approach rather than create a State-sponsored body with the extra flexibility such a body has vis-à-vis the Public Service? That is the reason why so many of them were established and I think the Minister should give some explanation for his decision here. I am sure he has some reasons—possibly he considers them sound reasons —for this decision, but we would like to hear them.
With regard to other aspects of his speech I will say no more than that they are to be welcomed. The provision of swimming pools is long overdue. What is being done in regard to the itinerants is excellent. We should all echo the humanity and wisdom of his remarks with regard to the itinerants and the housing of them. We welcome also the establishment of the water resources section for the purpose of tackling the problem of pollution. The action of the Government in this respect is, I think, in response to public opinion. It is interesting to note that when public opinion asserts itself and voluntary effort is employed in areas such as this a response is produced. That has happened in the case of the itinerants. Again, in the case of water pollution, the Minister has very properly and very promptly responded to public opinion and public concern.
There is one matter the Minister has not dealt with except in very general terms. This is the problem of planning decisions in relation to areas which should be preserved. In all that has been said about Hume Street I do not think the Minister has, in fact, given us an adequate explanation for the action he took here. There is a great deal of confused thinking about this and I am afraid the Minister has contributed to it. When people raise the question of preservation there are various reactions, some less intelligent than others. One reaction—it is a kind of feeling that crops up occasionally behind the remarks of some people on the opposite side of the House, though it does not apply to all Members there —is the sort of feeling that anything built before 1921, unless it is a mud cottage, is apparently English in some way and not to be preserved. I state this in an extreme form. That proposition has not been enunciated, but it is a kind of attitude of mind, particularly in regard to Georgian buildings. It is a pity this is the technical description of them, though I have been told by an eminent architect that it is an incorrect description. They differ markedly from Georgian buildings elsewhere. They are a peculiarly Irish phenomenon. The fact that they are called Georgian, however, seems to have a prejudicial effect on the attitude of people on the opposite side.
I am afraid the Minister has contributed to the argument that the State cannot get involved in preserving these buildings. That is not an issue. I am not saying there are not buildings that the State should preserve, buildings the people will ask the State to preserve, and quite properly, but the proposition that the State should intervene and take over at enormous cost to itself vast stretches of Georgian Dublin for the sake of preserving it is something no one would put forward in the present state of our economic development. The proposition put forward is rather that, if you do not intervene in this situation by giving planning permission for speculative development, then, in respect of much of these areas—not all, but particularly the central core—and if you leave market forces to work themselves out, without intervening to make speculative development possible, in fact these houses will be preserved. If you make a requirement that the facade is to be preserved and the interior, where the interior merits such preservation, there will be found people willing to buy these houses in their current form and keep them in that form.
Many parts of what was formerly Georgian Dublin have become slums and, unless some benevolent protector intervenes, they are bound to crumble away. Some, indeed, have crumbled away at the expense of the lives of people in and near them. But in the part of Dublin about which I am talking there is not, I think, a problem in providing financial aid in order to preserve these houses. All that is needed is a policy decision. We thought we had a policy decision from Dublin Corporation that these buildings should be maintained in their present state. If, as a result of imposing this condition on these buildings, it transpires that in respect of part of this area no one is willing to buy, subject to that condition, except perhaps for the purpose of allowing them to become tenements and slums, then we would, of course, face a dilemma, the dilemma between the Government putting up money in order to preserve them or allowing them to deteriorate. This is a dilemma that has to be faced and, if it arose on a large scale, it might be difficult to justify the Government spending money on a large scale in order to preserve these buildings. But this is not, in fact, the position. The position in regard to most of this area is that this condition was imposed on people willing to buy these houses but, in fact, the tendency has been towards a growing investment in the area and towards a restoration of these buildings. People have been willing to invest very substantial sums in these buildings. I know one case in Fitzwilliam Square where eight years ago £30,000 was paid for a house and £23,000 was spent in putting it in order merely to use it in its present form, without any extension or any change in it for office purposes. The fact is that in their present form, and subject to these restrictions with regard to maintaining the facade and the interior, where that is desirable, people are not alone willing to keep them as they are but to maintain and improve them. All the pre-servationists ask the Government to do is not to intervene unless they are convinced that the area will turn into a slum and needs something done to prevent that.
