The Government has agreed a significant concession to builders on the controversial proposal requiring them to transfer up to 20 per cent of development sites to local authorities for affordable and social housing.
The Minister for the Environment, Mr Dempsey, will next week publish an amendment to the Planning and Development Bill to include a new provision that would let builders negotiate with local authorities to permit them to actually construct the 20 per cent social-housing element of developments.
The Government amendment is understood to allow developers to agree a price with the local authority of the social housing schemes that would include an element of "construction profit" for the builder. At present the Bill requires developers to sell to local authorities at agricultural prices up to 20 per cent of every site for "social and affordable" housing.
The change would enable developers to take a profit on the construction of the social housing but not on the transfer of the land to local authority ownership.
A Government spokesman last night defended the amendment, saying it would help in the uniformity of houses that were built in developments.
The director of the Irish Homebuilders' Association, Mr Ciaran Ryan, said it would make "no difference as it only means that we will become contractors for local authorities. We are still not being allowed to work as private builders on our sites".
The first indication of a change of direction by the Government came on Wednesday during a discussion on the proposed legislation in the Seanad. To the surprise of the Opposition the leader of the Seanad, Mr Donnie Cassidy, asked that debate on the section relating to the 20 per cent proposal be delayed until next week. The Opposition parties were told that the Government had not yet prepared its amendments to the Part 5, Housing Supply, which contains the controversial 20 per cent proposal.
The Labour leader of the Seanad, Mr Joe Costello, last night said this decision was "highly unusual" as there had been no previous indication that the Government intended to amend the section.
In a related move, the Labour Party will today publish a private members' Bill containing the broad elements of Section 5 in the Government's Bill. Its environment spokesman, Mr Eamon Gilmore, has argued that there would be too long a delay before the 20 per cent proposal came into effect if it remained as one element of the Planning and Development Bill which may take over a year to pass into law.
However, in a significant departure from Mr Dempsey's proposals the Labour Bill will contain a section noting that any application for a residential development which comes before a local authority from today will be subject to the 20 per cent social-housing requirement.