Rebecca Moynihan (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I am really delighted to address the zoned land tax and what it actually is because it has been raised by the previous speaker and is important.

From a housing perspective, this budget contains three measures. It is a budget for landlords and landowners. There is absolutely nothing in the budget for renters. There is nothing in the budget for people who are on the housing assistance payment, HAP. HAP limits have not changed since 2016 and in that time rents have gone up by 25%. What is in the budget is a tax cut for land hoarders and no incentive for those who own empty homes to either sell or rent them. There is no mention whatsoever of an empty home tax.

I begin with the issue of the zoned land tax, which is effectively a tax reduction for landowners. The criticism of the vacant site levy and its enforcement is valid. With respect to what has been raised, the €21,000 last year is a disgrace but local authorities have not been resourced to go after it. There were arguments it should be going through Revenue, and that is happening. There were many sites which should be on it. There were too many get-out clauses, including, for example, landowners saying sites were being used for car-parking and were thus in use. That should be taken out of it. There were, as such, plenty of operational issues with the vacant site levy but it could have been reformed, given to Revenue and the site size abolished. What this is doing is putting some lipstick on a pig and saying this is being changed but effectively bringing it down from 7% to 3%. Senator Pauline O'Reilly says it is up to the Government to bring in the money and the levy was not bringing it in. However, when I was listening to the Minister, Deputy O'Donohoe, he was saying it is not a revenue-raising measure; instead the idea is it is going to activate land. The problem was that land was not being activated. One does not cut tax to try to activate land management. That was the problem and that was the issue with it. This is just dressing up what is a tax cut for land hoarders and that is the headline issue that comes from it.

We can also look at what is happening for renters. Is there anything included for renters or for people on the HAP? The answer is "No". The one measure announced for the rental sector is that landlords are able to claim more expenses when they are turning it around, which is the equivalent of void funding. I have no problem with that. I do not want landlords feeling it is too expensive for them to do a property up in order to be able to rent it out. I do have a problem when there are tax breaks for landlords and none for renters. I have a problem in terms of the affordability. Let us look at the root causes of the housing issue, which the Government keeps on saying is supply. Indeed it is but supply is being hindered by the vested interests who at every single step frustrate the policy framework of getting us to affordable housing. In Housing for All we saw the mention of 20% affordable housing. I acknowledge we went from 20% to 10% of land value but we see a situation where we are now announcing it is going to be 10% social housing and an additional 10% affordable but that is not going to kick in. We can look at things like the vacant homes tax, where in my own area build-to-rent institutional investors leaving homes empty in order to artificially keep rents high. We see it in things like build-to-rent apartment standards which are not in line with apartment standards. In the long term we will have people who will not be able to have balconies in such developments. We see it with apartments being brought under the stamp duty rules at the time when there was outrage from first-time buyers about institutional investors buying properties instead. What happened was the rules were put in place for people who lived in suburban areas and those who lived in dense cities were not included.

The Labour Party would introduce a vacant homes tax. We would increase a vacant site levy, or zoned land levy, or whatever one wishes to call it, to 10% and tackle the underlying issues of land speculation and hoarding. That was a question of the operation of the tax, not the fact, amount, or rate of it to begin with. The Government keeps on saying it is in favour of homeownership. For some reason this seems to give them a get-out clause and ignores the need of renters, who are a growing cohort of people in this country. There have been no changes to the HAP limit at a time of runaway rents when rates have increased by 25% during this time.That is the housing section of this budget and what it proposes does not give much flesh beyond Housing for All.

I will address the working from home tax breaks because it is a serious issue that we need to discuss. We must not sleepwalk into essentially subsidising the private sector for its employees. The proposal will lead to a massive transfer of expenses that employers would have incurred to the State, employees and taxpayers. The costs of running an office have been shifted from the shoulders of employers to employees for the days that the latter are working at home. The costs of infrastructure involved in that, such as adequate housing or access to a spare room from where to work, are being shifted onto the shoulders of workers. That is fine for someone who has a spare room many people do not have a spare room. Are we locking people from working-class backgrounds out of access to the professions because they cannot afford the infrastructure that would enable them to work remotely? That is a serious issue that we need to think through before we sleepwalk into a revolution whereby employers get out of that. My Labour Party colleague, Senator Marie Sherlock, published a working from home Bill which would have required employers to make daily payments in respect of utility costs rather than receive a State subsidy.

I spoke last week about an arts capital programme. I welcome some of the measures in this area in the budget. The Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Deputy Catherine Martin, fought hard for the arts sector and arts groups. However, I draw attention to a missed opportunity, namely, the absence from the budget of an arts capital programme. Since 2015, there has been a crisis in working spaces for artists in Dublin city. We are seeing studio space after studio space for artists close down. The first was Broadstone Studios on the north side, which estimated it had paid €1 million in rent to its landlord. Now, in my area of Dublin 8, Pallas Studios will have to close down. The Arts Council gives artists money to pay for rent but they must keep moving on. We need to take a serious look at long-term funding for arts infrastructure and provide loans to arts organisations to allow them to pay off a mortgage. The failure to include something like that in the budget was a missed opportunity.