Steven Matthews (Wicklow, Green Party)
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38. To ask the Minister for Finance the position regarding the living cities initiative; the number of successful applications; the number of residential units that it has added to the housing stock; the cost to the Exchequer of each broken down by county to date in tabular form; if any consideration is being given to expanding the criteria for eligibility for this scheme; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [36456/22]

Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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The Living City Initiative (LCI) is a scheme of property tax incentives provided for in sections 372AAA to 372AAD of the Taxes Consolidation Act 1997. It offers income or corporation tax relief for qualifying expenditure incurred in the refurbishment and conversion of qualifying residential and commercial buildings located within ‘Special Regeneration Areas' in Cork, Dublin, Galway, Kilkenny, Limerick and Waterford.

There are three distinct types of relief available under the Initiative. These are:

- owner-occupier residential relief;

- rented residential relief; and

- commercial or retail relief

Applications are required to be made to the relevant local authority under the owner-occupier and rented residential elements of the LCI scheme and the local authority may issue a letter of certification in respect of these elements. Applications to the local authority are not required to be made under the commercial element of the scheme. Revenue obtains information from the City and County Councils in respect to the number of valid applications received by them. Based on the most recent information received by Revenue from the City and County Councils, the number of successful applications per eligible city since the introduction of the scheme are as follows:

Data in relation to claims for the LCI, including the maximum tax cost, are available on the Revenue website for the years 2013 to 2018, the latest year for which fully analysed data are available, at:

www.revenue.ie/en/corporate/documents/statistics/tax-expenditures/property-reliefs.pdf.

This report will be updated over the coming months with data for both 2019 and 2020. The data for the scheme, to the extent that they are available, are set out below:

Living City Initiative

*assumed at 40% for IT and 12.5% for CT.

Revenue advise me that it is not possible to specify the extent to which tax relief under the scheme may have supported qualifying work within each of the local authority areas; and that statistical data are not available on the specific number of residential units that have been added to the housing stock under the LCI from 2014 to date.

The LCI is due to sunset on 31 December 2022 and a review of the Initiative is currently being undertaken by my Department in the context of Tax Strategy Group deliberations. Ultimately, the future of the LCI beyond its current sunset date is a matter that will fall to be considered by Government in the light of the findings of this review and in the context of the Budget 2023 and Finance Bill 2022 process.