I too want to raise what I believe to be the scandal of the strategic housing development scheme. I raised it with the Taoiseach yesterday. We put in a submission to the review weeks ago calling for the scheme to be scrapped.

Before the summer, a People Before Profit motion calling for the scheme to be scrapped was passed by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council. This motion was proposed in light of Bartra's absolutely disgraceful strategic housing scheme in Dún Laoghaire, which involves 210 units of little box rooms with fold-out beds but no social or affordable housing. Our opposition to this scheme has now been confirmed by the revelations in an article in The Sunday Business Post at the weekend and by the studies carried out in UCD and elsewhere. It has clearly emerged that the strategic housing development scheme was dreamed up by developers. The Minister who put it forward needs to explain how it is being claimed by developers that he took their plans on board - lock, stock and barrel - and stuck them into the housing Bill. It is now clear that this scheme is nothing more than a licence for property speculators to speculate, to hoard land, to flip land and to print money. It is not delivering what the Minister promised when he introduced the Bill. He said it would deliver housing to address the housing emergency that has developed after the Minister's eight years in government.

We all know the sins of Fianna Fáil and of those who put money into bailing out the rotten and toxic banks, instead of putting it into housing and other public services and forms of infrastructure. We are now paying the cost of that. We need answers. Is it the case, as the developers are claiming, that this Bill was dreamed up by them for them? It is enriching them, while failing to deliver the affordable housing that is needed to address the housing crisis. Two thirds of the houses or apartments that have been approved under this scheme have not commenced. Some of them are for sale. In such cases, it is absolutely clear that properties are being flipped. When planning permission is provided under the fast-track strategic housing scheme, the value of the asset held by the property developer is inflated. This encourages the developer to flip it on and make a lot of money. We know that speculation and hoarding by developers is rampant at the moment. The Minister has said that the delivery of housing has improved, but all the experts are saying we need 35,000 housing units at this stage if we are to catch up with the deficit. We are nowhere near that, but we have the scandal of this scheme failing. Rather than building public and affordable housing on public land, which is what some of us have been asking it to do for five or six years, the Government is continuing to expect profit-driven property speculators to solve the housing crisis when all they are doing is exploiting it.

I think I answered this question yesterday and today. Perhaps I can elaborate a little on what I said earlier. The purpose of the strategic housing development scheme is to speed up the planning process. If somebody wants to build an apartment block or a housing estate, there is a two-step process. When one submits a planning application to the council, people can make observations on it. The decision that is made by the council can be appealed to An Bord Pleanála, and the whole process happens all over again. The idea behind the strategic housing development scheme is a sensible and logical one. It allows somebody who is building 100 homes or more to skip one step in the process and go straight to An Bord Pleanála. The purpose of it was to fast-track the planning process to cut weeks or months off the time it takes to build new homes. That is the intention behind it. As the Deputy has pointed out, some 16,000 new homes have been granted permission under the scheme. Some 6,000 of them are under construction. The other 10,000 homes are not yet under construction, but they could well come into construction over the next year.

They are not homes.

They are not homes.

They are units.

They are houses and apartments, or whatever the Deputies want to call them.

They are studios that are built to be rented out.

It is a tiny percentage.

It is not.

The Deputy is playing politics.

I am not.

The Deputy is making two assumptions that may not be correct. First, he is assuming that if the developers had gone through the old two-step process, somehow these dwellings - homes, houses or whatever you want to call them - would be under construction. He is assuming that, but he does not have evidence to back it up. Second, he is saying that landowners and builders use the fast-track planning process to get planning permission for their land in order to increase its value. That may well be the case, but they could have done that anyway through the old process of applying to the council and getting permission for 150 units, thereby adding to the value of the land. The two assumptions made by the Deputy are not backed up by evidence. The Department has carried out a review. When any new policy decision is made or any new scheme is launched, it is sensible to review it after two or three years to see how it is going. In the coming weeks, the Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, will be in a position to bring the review that has been carried out by the Department to the Cabinet and to make it public.

We have proposed a solution. We have called for the scheme to be scrapped. We have pointed out that nothing in the scheme guarantees that there will be any - any - affordable or public housing, as we witnessed with the Bartra proposal at Eblana Avenue with no social and affordable housing but box rooms. The strategic housing development application at Cross Avenue in Blackrock involved apartments that would cost €1 million each, in effect. This would be completely unaffordable for the local authority, even if there was 10% social housing. What is the point in that? What is the point in giving fast-track planning permission for housing which, even if it is constructed, is totally unaffordable and totally unsuitable, does nothing to address the housing crisis and may not even deliver social housing? There is no point in doing that. When the Government introduced this legislation, we were told it would help to address the housing crisis. That was the central context and was why people did not oppose it at the time. Now it is becoming clear that it is not doing that.

What about the 6,000 homes?

It is not delivering housing at all in many cases. There is evidence that sites are being sold on after planning permission has been obtained. Rather than delivering affordable housing, this scheme is facilitating flipping, speculating and hoarding. We are calling on the Taoiseach to scrap it because it is being used and abused by property speculators. The Government must start do what we called for all along, even at the time of the legislation, namely to build public and affordable housing on public land on the scale that was done in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. The Government seems to claim it cannot be done in the 21st century. We do not believe the Taoiseach. The developers are telling the Government what to do.

I thank the Deputy for his follow-up question. This fast-track planning process has already resulted in 6,000 new homes being built, with another 10,000 to come. They are some of the 45,000 new homes that have been built since I became Taoiseach.

They are not all homes.

There is already a one-step planning process for social housing. It is called Part 8. It is not necessary to bring in a one-step planning process for social housing because that already exists and has existed for many decades. Only private housing had to go through the two-step process. There is a one-step process for social housing, and it is called Part 8. We are now well into the biggest social housing programme in decades. We are doing what the Deputy called for. We are adding approximately 10,000 new units to the social housing stock every year.

How many of them are private?

Having come from a base of almost nothing, we are now up to over 10,000 every year. The vast majority of them are new-builds by local authorities and housing associations.