Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)
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77. To ask the Minister for Finance the information obtained by his Department and the Revenue Commissioners to assist in the identification of households and persons in respect of the local property tax from the Central Statistics Office arising from the Census of Population 2011; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [22024/13]

Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael)
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I am advised by the Revenue Commissioners that they are precluded from using data obtained by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) in the Census of Population 2011 to identify individual residential properties and owners for inclusion in the Register of residential properties in the State, because the confidentiality of all information collected by the CSO from individuals, households or business is guaranteed by law under the Statistics Act 1993. This protection covers any information collected in the Census and the Act gives a legal guarantee that information provided on census forms will be treated as strictly confidential by the CSO. I am also advised, however, that information from the CSO Census 2011 at Small Area level was used by the Commissioners in developing their valuation guidance. “Small areas” are areas of population comprising between 50 and 200 dwellings created by the National Institute of Regional and Spatial Analysis on behalf of the Ordnance Survey Ireland, in consultation with CSO. The information provided by the CSO included property type (percentages of properties of different types for each small area) and age of property (percentages of properties constructed in each of the last 5 decades and pre-1960 for each small area). As the information is at neighbourhood level, it does not identify or include any information on specific properties or owners and consequently access to it is not restricted by the Statistics Act.

I am further advised that Revenue’s valuation guidance, which is based on sales since January 2010 taken from Revenue’s stamp duty records, also uses data from the CSO’s Residential Property Price Index to adjust for price changes in the interim. The Property Price Index provides guidance on establishing the percentage reduction to be applied to the price obtained for properties sold in 2010, 2011 or 2012.

As the Deputy will appreciate from the foregoing, the Revenue Commissioners used CSO data for the purposes of LPT administration where they were legally permitted to do so.