Brendan Griffin (Kerry, Fine Gael)
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262. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, and Local Government if he will postpone the rate review for businesses given the significant increase in the cost of living (details supplied); and if he will make a statement on the matter. [48464/22]

Darragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Fianna Fail)
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The Commissioner of Valuation is independent in the exercise of his functions under the Valuation Act 2001, as amended, and the making of valuations for rating purposes is his sole responsibility. I, as Minister, have no function in decisions in this regard.

The Valuation Office is currently engaged in a national revaluation programme, which is to ensure that the first revaluation of commercial and industrial properties in all rating authority areas in over 160 years is conducted across the country, as soon as possible, and on a phased basis. This is a welcome and positive development which is long overdue.

The latest phase of the programme is comprised of the revaluation of rateable properties in the rating authority areas of Clare, Donegal, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown (second revaluation), Galway, Kerry and Mayo County Councils and Galway City Council. This phase has already been postponed due to the Covid 19 pandemic.

The purpose of revaluation is to bring more equity, fairness and transparency into the local authority rating system and to distribute the commercial rates liability across ratepayers based on modern valuations and economic circumstances. In local authorities that have not yet been revalued, their valuations and, by extension, their rates liabilities are based on economic circumstances and property values that pertained in 1988.

Revaluation ensures equity and fairness in the rateable valuation system. Following revaluation there is a much closer and uniform relationship between contemporary rental values and the commercial rates liability of properties. In essence, the exercise aims to ensure that each ratepayer bears a fair share of the business rates burden relative to the modern rental value of the property that they occupy.

While an individual occupier’s rates liability may increase or decrease, the revaluation will not increase the overall commercial rates income of the Local Authority as the rates income of each Local Authority is capped in the year following a revaluation.

In those local authority areas revalued to date, most ratepayers post revaluation have seen their rates liability reduce. The last completed phase of revaluation comprised the revaluation of more than 30,000 rateable properties in the local authority areas of Cavan, Fingal, Louth, Meath, Monaghan, Tipperary, Wexford and Wicklow County Councils. The revaluation resulted in reduced rates for some 67% of ratepayers.