Mr. Roland O'Connell:

I thank the Deputy for that observation. We did think it through and if I am straying into the grounds of policy, I apologise for it but our view is there will have to be exceptions for a whole series of groups. Clearly, those who simply cannot afford to pay it must be an exception or some alternative route must be found for them. How such an alternative route is arrived at is a matter for those who are assessing the tax, rather then for us as property and construction professionals. Consequently, we believe there should be exceptions. It extends to instances such as those to which Deputy Boyd Barrett referred whereby people who have very low incomes may be living in relatively expensive houses and cannot afford to pay such taxes.

All of those things will have to be taken into account when levying the tax. We have not been cheeky enough to say this is how one should do it in the same way we have not presumed to say this is the right method to assess it because it depends on what the policymakers are trying to achieve. The one big issue we could distinguish within that is that it is a better system for funding local authorities to have an annual tax, even though it is not an ideal time to introduce it and there are huge difficulties with it at the moment. However, an annual tax of that nature is a better and fairer solution than transactional tax. That is as far as we went on that subject.