Cathal Byrne (Fine Gael)

I welcome the Minister. I am speaking on behalf of Fine Gael in the absence of our finance spokesperson, Senator Joe O’Reilly, who sends his apologies. He is abroad attending a meeting of the Council of Europe today.

I welcome to the House Senator Boyle's brother, Councillor Michael Boyle, and his guests. They are most welcome and I wish Michael the very best of luck in his new role on Donegal County Council.

I support this legislation. There are a number of key points I want to highlight. It is so important when it comes to any taxation policy, in my opinion, that we ensure we balance the need for affordability with providing consistency and stability, ensuring that people and individuals are aware of what their liability will be into the future. This legislation does exactly that. By ensuring we now move to a five-year period of valuations, we are allowing homeowners to have certainty about what their property tax liability will be as regards the valuations right up until 2030. That is so important that there are not up and down valuations year on year and uncertainty giving rise to confusion.

In regard to maintaining the 20 bands we have and ensuring there is a 20% widening of those bands, we are, in effect, making sure individuals who have seen a rise in the value of their home will not be overly burdened by the market increasing. This is so important when we consider the fact that, right across the country, there has been an increase in property values and that individuals who have no intention of selling their family home and intend to remain in it for the rest of their days will not be caught out and penalised as they would have been had the decision to widen the bands not been taken and included as part of this legislation.

It is important there is an emphasis given to the deferral scheme that exists under this legislation so that individuals who find themselves in a position of not being able to make the payment immediately have the option to apply, through the Revenue, for that deferral. As someone who has facilitated constituents in Wexford in making those applications, I pay tribute to the Revenue officials who deal with the request for deferrals in such a courteous manner. It is important to note that.

I spent five and a half years as an elected member of Wexford County Council where we utilised the ability of the local authority to increase and vary the local property tax by 15%. That decision was not taken lightly. As someone who voted on five occasions for that measure, first as a 10% increase to the base rate and thereafter to a 15% increase, that was a difficult decision to take. We saw first-hand the return that was given directly from that decision. I am a strong believer in local government. I genuinely believe we need a strong system of local government in this country and that we do suffer as a country from having, at times, too centralised a model. I very much welcome the opportunity for local authorities to take the decision to vary their local authority base rate on the LPT by up to 25%.

Wexford, as a county, that saw the benefit of the 15% increase, we specifically took the decision to ring-fence the additional revenue that was brought in - approximately slightly more than €1 million a year - for key projects. In my town of Enniscorthy, the council acquired the ability to develop a 38-acre site for the Enniscorthy Technology Park, investing €2.5 million in a state-of-the-art office building with plans to construct an advance factory. In Wexford town we have seen ambitious plans and the acquisition of the Trinity Wharf site which, when fully developed, provides Wexford town with the ability to have a ready-to-go site for foreign direct investment and which ultimately will be the home of the Maritime Area Regulatory Authority, MARA. In New Ross we have seen ambitious plans from the decision first taken in 2018 by Wexford County Council to increase the property tax base rate now realised on street refurbishment, and we recently had the opening of Brennan's Lane in New Ross by the Minister's colleague, the Minister, Deputy Calleary. The reason I raise this is because these were all projects directly funded by that decision taken by Wexford county councillors and, at the time, strongly opposed. One of the key things from that debate is that those who say it is not possible to raise the base rate are always happy to attend the ribbon cutting ceremonies, to be at the official opening and to be supportive of the projects, but when the time comes to take the difficult decision to raise the rate, they are nowhere to be seen. That is democracy in action but there is an element of hypocrisy in appearing at ceremonies to open events which were voted down when it came to funding them. It is important to make that point.

The fact that 96% of individual homeowners should see no change to the band they are in as a result of the decision to increase base rate of the bands by 20% is an important point to get out there in the public domain. The vast majority of people will not see any difference in the contribution they are making above and beyond the 3% to 6% that was flagged across the 20 bands. I remember when discussing this issue a number of years ago, there was a concern that if a house which was constructed before 2013 did not fall under the existing local property tax rules, it would therefore be pushed into a higher bracket than would otherwise have been the case than if that house has existed in 2012. I think that now, and the Minister might come back on this point, any house that has been constructed since 2013 will fall under the LPT regime but will be done so on the same basis as the valuations that apply to all other properties under this scheme.I have seen situations where a housing estate was constructed in 2010, 2011 or 2012 and a second phase was built later. In some cases individuals who moved in during the second phase were living next door to people who moved in during phase one and there was that element of uncertainty and an element of unfairness.

The Fine Gael group is supporting this legislation and the key decisions to increase the bands by 20%. The Minister has, with this piece of legislation, found the balance between the need for affordability while ensuring local authorities can forecast and budget for the next five years.