Mr. Niall Redmond:

We have been concentrating on what is in the heads of the Bill this morning but we are having significant engagement with the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government on vacant homes. Deputy Naughten raised the issue of rental income. That is a particularly difficult one, for the same principles I have outlined. Currently, there is no income within the scheme that is treated differently from other types of income. It would be difficult to try to segregate rental income and treat it differently and not have a situation where there is inequitable treatment. That is a major issue. I do not think that will work, in terms of the way the scheme is set up and what it is intended to do. That goes back to the issue of the cap and the precedent that exists in that regard. It has been a feature of the scheme since day one. We are working with the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government to look at, for example, the possibility of capping the proceeds from the sale of the home at three years. It is an anomaly that can be addressed. Currently, the situation with the scheme is that if one has the physical property one pays 7.5% of the value of the property for three years and then it is capped. If one decides to sell the property either before going into care or when one is in care the cash proceeds from the asset are not subject to a cap. If someone was in nursing home care for ten years, one would pay 75% of it. There is definitely an issue in that regard. That would be a barrier to people selling on the property. We are committed to having a look at that. It is unclear how quickly we can get through it, but it is our intention if people are in agreement that we could try to piggy-back an amendment to the scheme when the Bill is eventually debated. That is something we can do. One of the issues, more broadly, is trying to get good evidence and a good methodology in place. This goes back to the issue of proportionality. The rational process for delivering a policy objective is trying to understand realistically how many vacant homes are out there that are a direct result of a person going into long-term care. Some data came out of the 2016 census. The CSO has highlighted the difficulty in its disclaimers, for want of a better word, in that it was a small process that was done on an experimental basis. We are working with the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government to see what we can do to try to get a better handle on what the figures might be and have a more robust methodology for looking at those.

The second part of the equation is trying to understand what is the realistic benefit in terms of freeing up homes by making a change to the scheme. That is a difficult one in itself because if one takes something like, rental income, for example, just because something is a possibility does not mean that people will follow through. There may be a whole host of reasons for that, not least because what we are talking about are people who themselves may not be vulnerable but who are in vulnerable positions in terms of being elderly in a nursing home with various medical and other needs, but I am not sure how likely it would be to happen on a large scale that they would take on the role of landlord and all of the legal implications and responsibilities that has. That is an important aspect when we look at this issue. The more important piece is trying to segregate a particular type of income and treat it differently from every other income and have the situation we had previously where people of different means were paying different contributions but not based on paying more because they have more means but paying less because they have more means. That would create a very fundamental unfairness in the system.