Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

We will be supporting this Bill, which is generally welcome. It provides for incremental change rather than radical reform. There were some discussions in recent years about the desire to create a relationship between the turnover of a business and the commercial rates, but that is not really an aspect of this Bill. Whether that is achievable is another matter but it is certainly an issue. It means that some small businesses in villages and towns have a relatively small turnover but are quite vital to the vibrancy of the town or village and provide passive security and oversight and add to the pleasure of the village and town in terms of character. That certainly would have been welcome and there would be high value turnover in some of those locations but generally there is not.

I will come back to other aspects of the Bill shortly but we cannot examine rates in isolation. For example, if we look at the difference between the profile of income for local authorities in say 2009 and look at a chart for 2016, which is not terribly different from today, the general purposes grant would have made up one third of local government income. The two areas that have grown are, first, local property tax, but that is significantly less than the general purposes grant and the general purposes grant has been phased out. The other area that has grown fairly significantly in terms of the increased take is that of commercial rates. Many of those in the business sector were supportive of, for example, the introduction of a local property or a household tax on the basis that there was an expectation that it would be an addition to the general purposes grant and may have provided some relief in terms of commercial rates but, in fact, the general purposes grant has been phased out and we can see that this profile has meant there is an increase in commercial rates generally.

Several Deputies referred to the uneven collection rate. The National Oversight and Audit Commission does a profile of local authorities. There is a remarkable difference between Fingal County Council with a 96% collection rate and Donegal County Council with the lowest collection rate of 74%: a few years ago that rate was even lower. It is not a question of it being patchy in every local authority, it is patchy depending on which local authority it is. There must be some understanding of why that is the case. This Bill, to some extent, will deal with that.

I heard some of earlier debate on the revaluation of premises. It is only when one experiences it, that it strikes home. The change on paper is not dramatic and it is supposed to be neutral in terms of the overall take, but there are winners and losers. I question the rationale in that respect. If we were to create a zone where, for example, the nearer to the door of a premises one's outlet was the more expensive would be one's component of rates, and it would become less expensive as one went in through the premises, it strikes me that if one had a fairly small shop, that would put one at a decided disadvantage. There are issues in terms of examining the methodology used.

The length of time this process has taken from beginning to end is an issue. In some councils a revaluation will happen in advance of a first valuation happening because a ten-year timeline has been predetermined. It is right that there should be reasonably regular reviews. We will not end up with dramatic changes when that is done and there is a facility to question the valuation. There must be consistency.

It may well be that parts of a county are less viable than other parts of it. Making a provision in legislation to deal with that is fine but one will find some parts of individual towns are more viable than other parts. That is because of out-of-town shopping centres and the advantage of having free car parking in a shopping centre and the pressure resulting from, say, pay parking in a town or village. That makes it very unattractive when one compares it to the convenience of being able to park outside a centre and get everything in the one location. Aspects of that need to be considered in the valuation process.

When I reflect on Griffith's Valuation, he started it in 1847 and it was completed less than 20 years later.

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