Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank Mr. Coleman for the opening statement. I will be frank. I appreciate it is his job to give the best possible presentation as to what the LDA is doing but I have to say it is doing enormous damage to the very idea of cost rental at its very inception stage. The reason I say that is because when I look at the rent the LDA is charging on the most recent round of offerings - let us take Citywest in my own constituency - the agency is offering rent in the region of €1,400 a month for a one-bedroom unit and, for a three-bedroom unit, rent of almost as much as €1,800 a month. That means to get access to these properties under the LDA's own rules, where the rent can be no more than a third of disposable income, for the one-bedroom unit one would need to have a gross income of €75,000 and for the three-bedroom unit, you would need to have a gross income of €100,000.

The problem is that when I look at our social housing eligibility thresholds, the gap is huge and is growing because these prices are significantly higher than last year's prices for Archers Wood and elsewhere. In the case of a one-bedroom unit, as somebody above the local authority threshold would be on a gross income of €55,000, all those people from €55,000 to €75,000 are locked out. If you take a three-bedroom unit, the upper limit at the very top end for social housing is €70,000 and that is a very large family. There is a €30,000 gap between that and the eligibility to get into the agency's properties.

Consequently we need to be honest with ourselves and say that for a large number of people, cost rental was meant to be the solution, that is, intermediate housing for those who cannot buy, cannot rent on the private market and cannot get social housing. The vast majority of those people, however, are excluded from the properties the LDA is putting on the market. In some senses, that is not its fault, as I accept it has been given this scheme. It is one of the reasons why we opposed the legislation. The LDA goes to Citywest and buys apartments for half a million euro each, more or less. According to the information I have, it is paying more for turnkey units than are approved housing bodies. It did that in Archers Woods and it is doing it again and the rents are too high.

The problem is there is very little the LDA can do about that with the funding and the legislative framework it has been given. My understanding is that in some of its earlier projects, the agency is already starting to increase the rents and I would like Mr. Coleman to confirm that. In which projects have tenants received rent increases and why, because I do not see how the LDA's cost base has gone up within a year given that it is being funded through ISIF?

Given that rents have increased significantly from the LDA's first projects to these current projects, does Mr. Coleman expect rents to continue to rise? Second, is it the LDA's policy to introduce annual rent increases in line with the legislation, even if costs are not going up? Third, at what point, if any, does Mr. Coleman think the LDA's entry-level rents will come down to a level where people who are above the threshold for social housing but are below the appropriate level of income to get into an LDA property will be able to afford them? If the LDA is not providing intermediate accommodation, who is?