Ms Josephine Feehily:

Sometime after 1 July the Local Government Management Agency will give us a file containing a list of those who have paid the household charge. We will compare that with our file at that point. The gap will be obvious and we will then have some people who are LPT-compliant but not household-charge-compliant. We will have to contact those people and they will have to pay us €200 additional LPT. I do not see this happening until we have our own compliance campaign under way on the LPT. That is our first priority.

The household charge will come later. It is not going away but as far as I am concerned I need to finish this first. We need to identify those who have not engaged with us at all on the local property tax before we chase household charge arrears. It will be later in the process. There will be an opportunity for people to pay. As I stated, if people do not engage it will go on as a debt, at which stage it will be a local property tax and not a household charge. It will be treated the same as any other tax debt and we will collect it in the same manner as we collect local property tax or any other debts owed.