Ms Josephine Feehily:

Absolutely not. I hope I explained earlier when speaking to other Deputies that we started without a register. We never indicated that we knew the size of the property tax base. We have never put out a number because we were building the register from scratch. What we did say, and I said it myself when we launched the tax, was that we were writing in respect of 1.66 million properties. That was what we knew then. These were individual private citizens. It was always the case that the local authorities and social housing groups would have had to have been added to that number.

We also knew our register was somewhere north of 1.8 million, whatever that adds up to. We always knew we were in that territory. That was from taking our databases and the various databases I mentioned earlier. We never indicated what we saw as the end number because we simply did not know. What we said throughout was that we were writing in respect of 1.66 million properties. We were not writing to local authorities, for which we have another process. As time went on, we added another 30,000 to the 1.66 million, which means we eventually wrote in respect of 1.69 million properties. In addition, there are 160,000 properties covered by the local authorities or social housing associations. We have always been building up the number. Even in my earlier exchange, I stated I am still not sure what is the final base for this tax. It may be 1.99 million or 1.95 million - it is somewhere in that region but I do not know the exact figure.