Taoiseach launches plan to acquire cheap development land

THE Taoiseach has directed the Environment Minister and Attorney General to examine new ways of acquiring cheap land for development.

Mr Ahern has made similar pledges in the past to act on the issue, but no major initiatives were taken.

The cost of land remains a major factor in the escalating price of houses. A Permanent TSB/ESRI housing survey published in June revealed that land costs, as a percentage of the overall price of buying a home, shot up from 10% in 1996 to approximately 17% last year.

A particular problem is that a small number of landowners and developers control large swathes of the land available for housing, and only release sites when they can realise maximum value for them.

The opposition has been pushing over the last number of years for recommendations contained in the 1973 Report of the Committee on the Price of Building Land — known as the Kenny Report — to be implemented. The main recommendation was that local authorities should be allowed to cap compensation for compulsorily acquired land in designated areas at existing use value plus 25%.

While the committee, headed by Mr Justice Kenny, believed such a proposal would not be found unconstitutional, successive governments failed to implement it. Now, however, the Taoiseach has directed Environment Minister Dick Roche and Attorney General Rory Brady to revisit the report as part of an overall examination of the issue.

“The issues raised in the Kenny Report continue to be of importance,” Mr Ahern’s office said in a statement yesterday. “The Taoiseach has asked the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government and the Attorney General to examine possible ways of improving the supply of building land in a cost-effective manner.”

Mr Ahern has made tentative moves on the issue several times in the past.

In February 2000, he asked the All-Party Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution to examine afresh the ground covered by the Kenny Report. Specifically, the committee was asked to assess whether the Constitution blocked legislation which would control or regulate the price of building land.

In its report published in 2004, the committee found that it was “very likely that the major elements of the Kenny Report recommendations — namely that land required for development by local authorities should be compulsorily acquired at existing use values plus 25% — would not be found to be unconstitutional”.

But, again, the proposal was not implemented.

In April 2003, a year before the report was published, the Taoiseach said he would consider holding a constitutional referendum on the issue of land ownership in an effort to control house prices, but the referendum did not materialise.