Cian O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay North, Social Democrats)

I move amendment No. 45:

In page 60, between lines 23 and 24, to insert the following: "Report on tax expenditures for property developers

41. The Minister shall, within 6 months of the passing of this Act, prepare and lay before Dáil Éireann a report on the fiscal and housing-market effects of tax reliefs and incentives available to property developers, and on alternative approaches to achieving housing-supply objectives without such tax expenditures.".

This is related to much of the discussion that we have just had. It is one of these report amendments. I have not written it as a report amendment because I could not get the amendment in in any other way. I genuinely feel that a report and analysis on this would be extremely beneficial.

As we were discussing earlier, there have been a range of different subsidies and tax expenditures, and tax reliefs and incentives, over a number of years that I do not believe collectively are working. As I outlined previously, there are significant issues in the sector that need to be addressed around productivity and private sector investment on the capital stock side, etc. There needs to be an analysis done of all the different measures, subsidies and tax expenditures that are in place and a cold, hard look at what effect they are having or not having, what distortions they are creating or not, whether they are incentivising what they were intended to incentivise originally and what level of dead weight there is. We have a situation of growing profits in the sector, but certainly not growing affordability. In fact, it is the opposite. We see important input costs, such as the price of development land, increasing year after year.

Everybody knows that a lot of what needs to be done to ensure that we have more affordable housing that people can access simply is not happening. A range of tax expenditures and reliefs have been put in and they are not working so this needs to be urgently reviewed at this stage.