Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The Green Party will also support the Bill. A couple of things that were done during our time in government may be useful or additional to this Bill, or may show that it is not impossible to take a different approach. We introduced and passed a Bill on a supernormal tax on rezoning profit. It was an 80% tax on rezoning gain, which does not belong to the landowner but to the public decision-making process. That Bill was pulled by the last Fine Gael-Labour Party Government because it was not raising any revenue but of course it was not because in 2011-2012 we were not in the part of the cycle that we are in now. It was a terrible mistake, and for no good reason, to remove a Bill that went one step towards capturing some of that value. While I very much welcome the provisions set out in Deputy Wallace's Bill, when we were in government we brought forward the introduction of a site value tax which would also help towards really efficient use of land. The Department of Finance fought that tooth and nail for no good reason, as far as I could see, other than at the time, back in 2009-2010, we did not know much of the ownership of land. There was a real problem around landownership particularly in Dublin city because there was not a proper, updated, modern land registry which showed who actually held the title on large sections of land. We started setting about rectifying that, updating the register and in the transfer to the new Fine Gael-Labour Party Government we pushed the site value option. It was put in the programme for Government and then abandoned as the Government went for a straight property tax model which was good at raising revenue in the short term but gave us none of the benefits that we could have got in the way of efficient use of the land which a site value tax would bring. As well as a vacant site tax to tackle the issue of land not being used but hoarded a site value tax still makes real sense. It makes real sense environmentally because it would push and promote what we need to do, denser development back in the centre and core of the city and it would provide a disincentive for our long-held tradition of spreading ever further outwards, disregarding the cost to the public purse of having to provide ever increasing infrastructure in a more and more dispersed population. We should reintroduce the tax on zoning profit because that does not belong to the landowner. As well as the provisions in this Bill, we should consider a site value tax rather than the current property tax and we attitude. We need to stop seeing property developers as the solution to our housing problem. They are there to work for us not for their own interests.

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