Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)
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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.

The the LCI scheme was extended for a further five year period to 31 December 2027 in Finance Act 2022. The owner-occupier element of the relief was also enhanced in Finance Act 2022 for new entrants from 1 January 2023. Owner-occupiers may claim the relief over seven years rather than ten. Where they can’t absorb the deduction in-year, claimants will have the ability to carry forward relief up to a maximum of ten years after the expenditure is incurred.

Applications are required to be made to the relevant Local Authority. Revenue obtains information from the Local Authorities in respect to the number of applications received by them. Based on the most recent information received by Revenue, the number of total applications per eligible city since the introduction of the scheme are as follows:

Local Authority	Number of applications
Cork	113
Dublin	184
Galway	11
Kilkenny	17*
Limerick	54
Waterford	76

*Previously 18, the local authority have informed Revenue of the withdrawal of an application.

Revenue advise that it is not possible to break these applications down by year due to the low number of claimants and the need to protect taxpayer confidentiality. It is also not possible, with the data provided to Revenue, to break these applications down into successful and unsuccessful applications.

The Deputy will wish to note that information in relation to the overall cost of the scheme is available on the Revenue website for the years 2013 to 2020, the latest year for which fully analysed data are available, at www.revenue.ie/en/corporate/documents/statistics/tax-expenditures/property-reliefs.pdf.

The data for the scheme, to the extent that they are available, are set out below:

Tax Year	Amount claimed (€m)	Maximum tax cost* (€m)	Number of claimants	Average value of claim per claimant
2020	1.1	0.3	50	€22,000
2019	1.5	0.5	60	€25,000
2018	0.5	0.2	27	€18,519
2017	0.4	0.2	23	€17,391
2016	0.5	0.2	15	€33,333
2015	0.5	0.2	13	€38,462
2014	0.2	0.1	N/A	N/A
2013	0.1	0.0	N/A	N/A

*assumed at 40% for Income Tax and 12.5% for Corporation Tax.The estimated tax cost is based on the assumption that the marginal income tax rate of 40 per cent generally applies to income tax claimants. The actual cost is not available in the tax return data as each taxpayer’s tax liability is computed by reference to all of their taxable income(s) and any applicable allowances, credits or other reliefs. Therefore, a median sum paid is not available.

Data in relation to 2021 will be available in the second half of this year.