Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for remaining for the whole length of the debate. It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge the amount of work that has gone into a Finance Bill that runs to 93 sections and approximately 215 pages. I recognise that some good steps have been taken in relation to the temporary business energy support scheme, which needs to be closely monitored, the extension of the 9% VAT for gas and electricity and the welcome move to reduce VAT on newspapers to zero, as well as many other good things in relation to once-off payments.

However, notwithstanding that there has been a boast of €11 billion, I have been in the Dáil since 2016 and have been desperately waiting, campaigning and working for a transformative budget, one which recognises that we can never go back. Covid told us that, as did climate change and biodiversity. I have read some of the speeches made on biodiversity on the Government side. They are wonderful and acknowledge the seriousness of it. That is not captured at all in the budget. That is my difficulty with once-off payments. The Government had to give those payments, given rising energy costs and the spiral we are caught in, but at no stage since I came in in 2016 have I seen transformative change. I have seen the Minister's words to the effect that the planet is burning, or perhaps it was his colleague. That was welcome in the speech last year but was not repeated this year, though the planet is burning even more. We need transformative change; there is no going on in the same way. When we pass a budget like this with piecemeal measures, some of which are very welcome, it is ignoring the elephant in the room, which is that we have to change whether we like it or not.

I can pick out anything but will pick out the help-to-buy scheme.I have raised it many times. I have a file here. I have read all the reports. The Minister has in section 5 extended it for another two years. He has not taken on any of the recommendations in the Mazars report. If it captures anything, it captures the language used in relation to change and then there is absolutely no change. That is what has happened here. We have had report after report. It was introduced and mentioned in 2016 and came into the budget via the Finance Act in operation in 2017. In each budget it has been extended. The estimated cost, originally, as the Minister knows much better than I, was €40 million. It looks like it will cost over €1 billion by next year. The Minister can tell me if I am wrong about the figures but I have looked at and read all of the reports.

I thank the Parliamentary Budget Office, which did a brilliant report. I would love to know what the contracting out of reports costs us and what the Parliamentary Budget Office gets to do its very good reports. Key messages are:

By the end of 2021, the estimated total cost of approved HTB claims was €559.7 million, [at that stage it was] 43% above cost estimates. ... A third of recipients did not need HTB to meet the 10% deposit ... and could instead use the scheme to create larger deposits. This could be described as “deadweight loss”, which means activity which would have taken place [anyway] without the tax incentive.

There is much more in that but I will go to the most recent report. I would love if the Minister had the cost of it for me.

I will refer to the executive summary of the Mazars report, though I have read more than that. It is interesting that part of the logic for introducing this scheme was that the Central Bank was so strict in the criteria it laid down for what one could borrow. It was to step into the vacuum caused by the prudence of the Central Bank. Now we will face the situation in January where the Central Bank has altered its rules and we can borrow up to four times a salary to buy a house that none of us can afford really. It does not make sense that we persist with the scheme for another two years at a time when the Central Bank says we can borrow away.

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