Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Monday, 16 November 2020

Select Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach

Finance Bill 2020: Committee Stage

Photo of Pearse DohertyPearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

My first question would be to understand where the Minister is coming from. Will he give the committee his understanding of what is affordable housing? What is the number in his head for affordable housing? I will not go into the discussions Dublin City Council will have as they will be well played out later on. However, it goes to the core of Fine Gael's policy, which it pushes strongly, which allows for a large portion of State lands to be used for private profit purposes with no restrictions on affordability. What is the Minister's understanding of affordable housing?

On the points I made earlier, the Minister did not respond to any them. Will he respond to the fact that 40% of those who are benefiting from the scheme will not require any proceeds from the scheme to have the deposit to buy their first-time house? That 40%, 8,000 applicants, represents approximately €24 million. What is his view on what some would call or what is known as deadweight? What is his view of the fact that 56% of the help-to-buy recipients bought houses in excess of €300,000, while 22%, nearly one in four, bought houses in excess of €376,000? This tax incentive scheme is used to buy houses which are above the medium price rate for houses across the State.

It echoes what the Parliamentary Budget Office, PBO, stated about the higher end of the market and so on. What is the Minister's view on those key questions? Perhaps he would also answer the comments of Dr. Roantree from the ESRI, which I put on the record of the committee. He clearly suggested that the help-to-buy scheme was likely to lead to house price inflation and that in the absence of supply, it will create additional demand. Will the Minister respond to those three or four points?

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