Dr. Se?n Healy:

I thank the committee for the invitation. Social Justice Ireland welcomes the opportunity to speak today on Chapters 6, 7, 8 and 14 of the report. While we have confined our statement to the chapters specified, we would welcome the opportunity to engage further with the committee on other aspects of the report. We are much more positive about some of these elements and we have a question or two about other aspects of the report.

When the commission was established, we welcomed it, in particular its broad remit, which reflected an understanding of the integrated nature of the taxation and welfare systems in the lives of individuals, families, companies and communities, and the importance of Government policy being framed in this overall context.

We have an established record of engaging on policy issues regarding the whole taxation system and the welfare system. These form central components of our annual work around things like our socioeconomic review, our annual pre-budget Budget Choices document and our annual post-budget material, together with other items we engage with, including our annual policy conference and engagements with Oireachtas committees and bodies such as the National Economic and Social Council, NESC.

We submitted a much longer than recommended opening statement which I will not read through. I will, however, highlight one or two pieces and the committee will have the rest of it, which gives more information than just flying across the top, if you like.

We welcome in particular the inclusion in chapter 6 of the need to broaden the tax base. This is a very important issue. Obviously, questions arise on Government decisions to raise or reduce overall taxation revenue and it needs to be linked to the demands the Government will have on its resources. These demands, in effect, depend upon what the Government is required to address or decides to pursue. We can see the kind of damage that can be done by looking back at the crisis we had more than a decade ago with the bailout and what subsequently happened, such the rapid increase in our national debt and many other things. We find ourselves today in a situation where, despite favourable lending rates, payback terms and so on, there remains a recurring cost to service this debt and that cost is likely to be rising. This debt is of a fairly substantial nature and it is just one of the demands the Government faces and which it has to meet. As a result, the idea we would widen the tax base is very positive from our perspective. I do not have the document with me on some work we have done on how much Government should collect in taxation, what the basis should be, what it might look like in practice and how that might be broken out in various ways.

One other issue I wanted to look at was the site value tax idea. We welcome the commission’s recommendation to introduce a site value tax, which is something we have advocated for many years. We believe it is a much fairer system than the current property tax and would prove to have many other positive consequences. It would, in particular, have the positive result of incentivising the use of land rather than leaving it unoccupied and unused. Consequently, we would be very positive about that as a core recommendation the Government should pick up, particularly recommendations 14.1, and following. We would make the qualifications the commission recommended that there should be differential treatment in the application of a site value tax to agricultural land, for obvious reasons in the context.

I will not deal with any more of our recommendations but we are generally positive about the various recommendations in these particular report chapters and we are quite happy to engage on any part of it on which the committee wishes to have further expansion. I reiterate that we have many comments in the document we have sent to the committee.