In Ireland any question of land arouses some response even in a city man like myself. It has been a great cause of contention from the time of Parnell to Davitt to Lalor and right down to the present day.
The Bill moved by Deputy Quinn on behalf of the Labour Party is a bit too simplistic to solve this problem. I am thankful to him that we have been given an opportunity to discuss this matter. If the solution were as simple as that portrayed by the proposer of the Bill, that would be very nice and we could find common ground on certain points. If this Bill were adopted it would lead to complete chaos. I am interested in building land, land on which to build more houses. I will direct my remarks to that aspect.
The objective of the Bill is to deal with the high cost of building land, especially land for housing, and to make sure that increases in value as a result of investment in water and sewerage services, roads and other infrastructure will not accrue to landowners or property speculators. Every member of my party subscribes to that doctrine. Nobody would oppose that as an objective.
I should like to examine the Labour Party's proposal for achieving this objective as outlined in this Private Members' Bill. The main proposal is to empower the elected members of local authorities to decide on the land which may be required for all housing, commercial, industrial and other development in a five year period, and to designate the land. The local authorities would then be obliged to acquire and finance the acquisition of all this land in a designated area, and pay for it at existing use value instead of market value. I find it difficult to visualise the landowners in a designated area queuing up outside their local authority offices to hand over their holdings at existing use value. It would be too much to expect that to happen.
If this Bill were enacted there would be complete chaos in the building industry because nobody would surrender land voluntarily. Therefore, it would have to be acquired compulsorily. Any voluntary agreement to the acquisition of the land would disappear. This would throw the housing programme into chaos. City and county managers have acquired a certain expertise in these matters. Very often land owners recognise that they have a duty to perform and do not oppose the acquisition. If the land had to be acquired compulsorily in every case, we would have queues of cases in the courts. I am convinced nobody would let the land go easily. While CPOs were being fought in the courts, the housing queue would get longer. Far from achieving the aims which I am sure the Labour Party sincerely set out to achieve, the Bill would achieve the very opposite. We would have chaos, whereas at the moment some kind of peace reigns.
You cannot increase land. The land is there. If it is marshy land you can reclaim it. If there are old buildings on it you can clear them away and build houses. You can find extra money or extra enterprise, but you cannot find extra land. Therefore, we have to be terribly careful how we enact laws to control land. With our growing population, with the demand for housing getting bigger all the time, we must ensure, by proper and wise government, that we can acquire the land needed.
Speaking as a Deputy who represents a city area, I know how difficult this is. It grieves me to see the price of a house built in the city. The acquisition of the land may be a very large factor in the cost of that house. We are building houses only half a mile from here, at City Quay, at quite a high cost. First, you must acquire the land from owners of factories and warehouses, compensate them, and then clear the land and start building. Despite the high cost, the Government have several schemes in the inner city. I believe in developing the inner city. I am realistic enough to know that this is not easily done. The problem of acquiring land must be overcome by wise Government.
I could not support the Labour Party's Bill. Instead of helping, the Bill would only add to the housing queue. You would not get a fluid acquisition of agricultural land near any city or town. You would find it also impossible to build up a land bank which is so essential for the continuation of a housing programme.
Under the Bill a local authority would have to acquire the land and then have to sell it back to the private sector. Take the case of a farmer who owns land. His son or daughter is getting married and wants to build a house. Under the Bill they could not do that. The local authority would acquire the land and then sell it back to the son or daughter to build a house. It is a very clumsy way of getting rid of the housing problem. That would happen if the Bill were enacted in its present form.
In addition, restrictions are proposed enabling planning authorities to refuse planning permission for development of lands in the designated areas for no reason other than the fact that they are located in such areas and, having done this, to refuse to pay compensation for the reduction in value. These proposals might indeed end speculation in land but unfortunately they would also put an end to the development of land in the designated area by the private sector. The majority of houses built each year are built by the private sector and that should be encouraged. It should not be left to the local authority to build all the houses needed because the local authority simply cannot do it. The private sector has built thousands of houses throughout the country and will go on doing so. We must help them. I do not say we should help them at any price but we should help them to build houses that people can afford and not put further obstacles in their way which will increase the price of houses because of the delays which would ensue. I do not suggest that our present laws are perfect and cannot be improved upon but I am convinced that this Bill would not improve the situation and therefore it would be a failure.
The designated area referred to in this Bill is an area where lands would be used in a five-year period for all new development. In deciding on the boundary of the designated area the Bill proposes that regard be had to the developmental plan of the area. Lands outside this designated area would presumably be sterilised for at least a five year period. The net result of all this is that building land in the designated areas would be tied up in compulsory acquisition proceedings and in the assessment of compensation, thus stifling new development in that area.
I do not doubt that the aims of the Bill are sincere. But sincerity in this is not enough. It is no use telling a family waiting for a house that because of a flaw in a Bill enacted by sincere people they cannot have a house. It would be a complete failure in regard to the speeding up of building on this land and, at any time, we need to speed up building. I could never support this Bill because I believe it would slow down the housing drive. I must say, in fairness to the Member who proposed this Bill, that I do not believe he intended this. He is as anxious to speed up housing as the rest of us but he has gone the wrong way about it. It would be better if he took the Bill back and had a look at it and then put it forward again.
I know there is a popular clamour to control the price of land, and it should be controlled. It is immoral that people make huge profits from land because it has become a scarce commodity. But wishful thinking does not control the price of land and we must have legislation which will enable the local authority and the private sector to build houses. If a person can afford a house he will get it in the private sector but if he is among the lower paid workers he will look to the local authority for it. His big need is a house and not the adjudication of how land should be acquired. The young couple who put every penny they have into savings to buy the house which they want need to be helped. The present legislation helps greatly. Again, we would all like to see more generous legislation. But we must be realistic. We have to face the housing problem. In my time in public life I have seen the frightful problem of housing in Dublin being brought down to manageable proportions. I am not being complacent when I say that. I realise there are 5,000 or 6,000 people on the housing waiting list in this city alone and that because of obsolescence and other reasons we lose a certain number of houses each year. But with building land being the key to the housing drive we must look at our laws to see how we can perfect them. We have made tremendous progress in housing. I heard the Minister say the other day that we would be building 25,000 houses this year. People ask is this enough, but it is a good number. We would like to see this increased but we must be realistic and wishful thinking will not build houses.
This Bill would certainly mean the end of free enterprise. I believe in free enterprise but it must be controlled for the common good. We do not want to see people making huge profits from building at the expense of people who can ill afford the rent or the purchase price of a house. At the same time over the years the private sector has contributed so much. Many of the builders in the private sector are men who started on their own. All builders are not fat barons who make vast sums of money. We have hundreds of small firms who must be given some land to build on. We must provide a pool of land so that the small builder can buy a site at a reasonable price to build houses so that they will be available to people who are on the waiting list of the local authority or who wish to buy privately from the builder. We must provide land for the building co-operatives so that the members can build their own houses.
Having said all that, we are back again to the acquisition of land. This Bill will certainly not help here. As I mentioned before, it would add greatly to the troubles of the local authority. In this Bill, when the local authority are fortunate enough finally to obtain a piece of land in their designated area and dispose of the land to a private builder the builder's problems are not over. He is now obliged, if he is not bankrupt at this stage, to develop the land on the local authority's terms and conditions and within specified time limits. There is no incentive offered to private builders in this Bill. The Bill assumes that the private building industry will agree fully with the proposed new arrangements. That is just not on. I am sure the Labour Party are aware that the acquisition of land by local authorities at present is not always a simple and straight forward task. If this Bill were to operate the local authority would be obliged not only to buy land for their own programme but also for the private housing sector. This land would also have to be bought by compulsory purchase procedures and would stifle new development. In addition local authorities would also be obliged to acquire and provide sites for industry and commercial development. The whole idea is unworkable. Compulsory acquisition on such a massive scale in the suburbs of our towns and cities has the flavour of an alien tyranny about it. Those who have served on local authorities will know that they have not got the staff or the machinery to go into such huge land deals. It is not the duty of the local authority to go into the industrial field. By all means let us plan our suburbs properly so that we will have housing and industry to employ the people who live there. This should all be done on properly planned lines. It has been done in lots of places all over the country. The local authority have a part to play in that development but they must not be seen to be a big brother organisation looking after every facet of the housing drive.
We are not a big country but we must use all the resources we have in so far as our housing drive is concerned. We must use the public sector—the town hall, the city hall and the staffs concerned—in ensuring that as many houses as possible are built each year, but let us not burden the public sector with a workload they are not geared to meeting. Far from helping in the housing drive the Labour Party's proposal would cause chaos. Again, there would be the question of the financing of the kind of situation they propose, and we all know that money is always scarce so far as building is concerned. Since the foundation of the State successive Governments have tried very hard in the area of house building. Any member of a local authority will be aware of the difficulty at times in regard to the housing drive but we have always managed by some means or other to maintain that drive.
As a country we have one of the highest housing stocks proportionately in the world but that is not sufficient reason for anyone to be complacent about the situation. We must realise that many people have to tolerate substandard housing conditions, people who are striving very hard to acquire proper housing for themselves and their families. To this extent we welcome any proposal that would make their task easier; but, so far as the Bill before us is concerned, it falls short in many respects. It appears to have been conceived hastily. Consequently, the Labour Party might reconsider it.
When the Minister for the Environment moved an Estimate here recently for his Department he told us that £120 million would be necessary in order to acquire a land bank during a five-year period. The Minister said that as the land is disposed of to developers some of this money would be recovered but that it would be necessary for local authorities to continue to purchase land in order to maintain a land bank. It is most essential that we have a land bank so that we shall not have a stop-go housing drive. In this way, regardless of what other problems we may have to face, at least land for housing will be available.
In a situation of an increasing population I do not expect that there can ever be an end to the housing shortage, but we can ensure that the problem is kept within minimum proportions. I am sure that all sides here share the common aim of providing as many houses as possible and of raising the standard of houses, thereby providing a better standard of living for our people, both in urban and rural areas. But it is in the cities that one finds the greatest level of poverty in terms of housing.
Apart from the financial implications of the Bill has any consideration been given by the proposers to the staffing implications, to what would be the needs of local authorities in implementing such a proposal? Even if we could afford the money that would be required to set up a new bureaucracy and even if the necessary qualified personnel could be found, there would be required also a new corps of officials who would become another layer in the planning control development machinery. We often hear bureaucrats being lambasted, and while a certain amount of bureaucracy is necessary we should not impose restrictions in regard to the building drive simply for the sake of imposing restrictions. We need a building drive that is flexible. We need to be fair to everybody, including landowners. We must ensure that our law afford them the same rights as those which apply to the rest of us. But, having said that, I would not have any hesitation in proposing laws which would prohibit anybody from making a vast profit out of land merely because of a scarcity of land for building.
I welcome the opportunity given to us by the Labour Party by way of this Bill to debate this question of land for housing but I do not think that their proposal would help the housing drive in any way. I regard the Bill as a gesture towards something the Labour Party would like to see implemented, but perhaps the failure of the Bill is in their not really knowing what they want. I agree with them regarding the control of land, but one must devise the machinery that would control land effectively and bring more land into use for the purpose of house building. A build up of control at local authority level would not help in regard to housing output. There is not any point in increasing bureaucracy unless one achieves greater effectiveness in what one is trying to do.
In these circumstances I must oppose the Bill. However, there are some aspects of the Bill in relation to the control of land and to exorbitant profits that this party would subscribe to also. However, apart from its faults, I still believe in the concept of free enterprise. I trust that the Labour Party will withdraw the Bill and perhaps bring forward another piece of legislation on another occasion which would help in this whole area of housing.
