Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I am at risk of repeating much that has been said about this budget this week already. However, I cannot but acknowledge the many good things that have been secured in this budget that will make our society better and fair.

My Green Party colleague, the Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, secured significant cuts in childcare fees. There is a 25% reduction in fees this year, moving to a 50% cut in two years. Funding for more childcare places and affordable childcare are critically important for our society, for parents, children and employers. It gives stability and security to the sector and was very good news for families throughout Ireland.

I welcome this budget because we are introducing free school books for primary school children and solar panels for every school in the country. I welcome this budget because of the historic €90 million allocation for nature and biodiversity. That is an 83% increase since the formation of this Government. There are energy credits, social welfare increases and a fuel allowance payment in this budget that will help our people through this winter. I welcome the major increases in the retrofitting budget with continued focus on low-income homes that will help insulate our people from high energy prices in the future.

However, in certain areas this budget did not go far enough. In my view, it is not sufficiently aligned with our climate policy. I say so particularly with respect to transport. I acknowledge there are good measures in the area of transport. The 20% cut in public transport fares and the 50% cut in fares for our young people are being extended to the end of 2023, but it has been reported that my party fought hard and expended political capital to get this. This should not have had to be the case. It is a policy that is popular and is right, and I would have expected it would have been enthusiastically supported by our coalition partners. I see the evidence daily, as I use public transport, of the benefit of this measure. There was a step change in usage when it was introduced a few months ago.

I want to talk about gaps that are in this budget and I will begin with vehicle registration tax, VRT. With respect to VRT measures that were implemented a number of years ago which aim to reduce inefficiency in the private transport fleet, to some degree they are succeeding, but I would argue they are not succeeding nearly quickly enough. We must drastically reduce the sale and use of fossil fuel vehicles. Those reforms are also not effective at reducing SUV sales. We can see that such sales are surging. They are a scourge on our roads. They impact on our climate but also on the safety of our people. It is my strongly held view that we have not used VRT to discourage SUV sales sufficiently. This should not be politically difficult. We are talking about the SUVs that have not been purchased yet. The only people who would have been upset are the car dealerships and the motor industry generally. We can and must stand up to them.

We have given generous grants to the taxi industry in recent years to purchase electric vehicles. It was time, in my view, to give supports to other sectors. My own preference was that home help workers would be supported. These are people who must use their own vehicles for their work, who are low paid, who provide a critically important and undervalued service for our elderly and infirm, who for the most part are rurally based, who cannot afford to purchase electric vehicles, yet who often must drive tens of kilometres daily in the course of their duties, thus, through no fault of their own, making a large contribution to our transport emissions.

With respect to active travel, beyond the overarching programme for Government commitments, there is nothing in this budget. It would be wrong of me not to acknowledge those overarching spending commitments. They represent an unprecedented investment in public transport and in walking and cycling infrastructure, and I am seeing the roll-out in my own constituency. I give credit to Limerick City and County Council and its active travel team for being unique among Irish local authorities, I think, in managing to spend their allocation and in developing a pipeline of well-designed projects for the future.

However, there was much more that could have been done with respect to a reduction in VAT on bikes, electric bikes and cargo bikes. With respect to cargo bikes, there is a shortage of drivers in the retail sector and we could have easily addressed that issue with supports for cargo bikes for businesses. The bike-to-work scheme remains limited to the PAYE sector. I believe broader supports are needed to encourage uptake in other cohorts, especially among the retired, the unemployed and those in education. Those are merely examples of where we could have done better in the budget.

It is important to understand that system change is needed in transport. Currently, our policies and our system promote growing car use and we are overly reliant on electric vehicles as a solution. It is not nearly enough that we transition our private fossil fleet to electric vehicles. This is not system change. In many ways, it is bedding in the system we already have, one that is the problem.

From a transport and climate point of view, we did not get it all right in this budget and our policy approach generally is not right either. We should be much more ambitious in the next budget but we have an opportunity now as the climate action plan is being revised to make amends for the gaps in this budget. It is critical, in my view, that we introduce a meaningful vehicle-kilometre reduction target. We simply will not reduce transport emissions by 50% by 2030 and we will not bring about system change unless we do this. Applying a vehicle-kilometre reduction target to all vehicles, not only those that run on petrol and diesel, is meaningful and beneficial to society. Our neighbours in Scotland are doing it and we should too.

I am looking forward to engaging with the Minister and his Cabinet colleagues in respect of the points I have made today.

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