Shane Cassells (Meath West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The witnesses are all very welcome and I thank them for their time and for coming before the committee. The amount of €1.5 billion is taken in commercial rates from the business operators and owners of this country each year. We are not dealing with small money in respect of the impact and the significance of the work of the Valuation Office. Very important debates are happening in the House in respect of health, education, housing, homelessness and abortion, and they are all dominating the national press. I am sure the witnesses are acutely aware that outside of the bubble of this place and at grassroots level, when the witnesses rock into towns and villages throughout Ireland, a very big issue that dominates the local press and, more pertinently, local council meetings is the revaluation process. The issue is the burden of commercial rates on businesses which make up the main spine of employment in this country and which, in many cases, have been crippled by increases in commercial rates. This is not just by virtue of the revaluation process but by increases by councils which, because they are underfunded by central government, increase the tax on the businesses that employ people and keep them in a job and keep this country ticking over. I have made this point previously to Mr. Lemass. It might not be the sexy story that grabs the headlines in here, but trust me when I say a huge swathe of people are interested in the witnesses' appearance here this morning, and even more so by the figures surrounding the revaluation process they are here to discuss, no more so than in my county of Meath, where I know the Valuation Office is heading to next.

If we start with the figures, since the establishment of the Valuation Office there has been a spend of €41 million. In recent years, the average spend has been €8 million to €9 million per annum. In his conclusions, the Comptroller and Auditor General made the point there has been painfully slow progress on the programme, and in the 15 years since the Valuation Act provided for a programme, only 43% of rateable properties have been revalued. We see an exception in terms of the speed because the average time taken by the office to complete revaluation prior to 2015 was 13 months, and I know Mr. O'Sullivan spoke about the enabling legislation which allowed it to speed things up. This has reduced since 2015. Interestingly, Mr. O'Sullivan referred to the pilot project in Carlow and Kilkenny, which was completed in 12 months and involved more than 5,000 properties, at a cost of €2.5 million for the contract and another €250,000 in contract costs. Again, this is not small money.

Why was the process so slow? I know what the Valuation Office has noted in terms of how it has speeded things up, but how, over the course of more than a decade, was the process so slow given what was at stake? There is now a requirement for all public bodies to be able to identify the costs associated with carrying out their work, and the Comptroller and Auditor General mentioned this interesting point. Obviously we can see the costs associated with the project in Carlow and Kilkenny, but we cannot find a comparable figure because the office does not have the costs. There is a requirement for all public bodies to have systems, practices and procedures in place to maximise the value of public money being spent, but in the absence of these costings we cannot make this adjudication. How can we compare value for money when we do not know how much it costs in the first place?