Paul Donnelly (Dublin West, Sinn Fein)
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916. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, and Local Government the reason none of the ECB interest rates cuts have been passed on to tracker mortgages holders, in particular those with local authority mortgages, which the local authority have said they have no control over. [11851/25]

James Browne (Wexford, Fianna Fail)
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Local Authority Home Loans are not funded through borrowings from the European Central Bank (ECB). Local Authorities do not issue and have never issued what are termed 'tracker mortgages', therefore there are no Local Authority home loans that track the ECB rate changes directly.

The current loan offerings available from Local Authorities are the Local Authority Home Loan and the Local Authority Purchase and Renovation Loan. These loans are Government backed mortgages for creditworthy applicants who cannot get sufficient funding from commercial banks to either purchase or build a home or in the case of the Local Authority Purchase and Renovation Loan to purchase and renovate a dwelling. They offer a fixed interest rate and are available nationwide from local authorities for first-time buyers and fresh start applicants.

Prior to the introduction of the Local Authority Home Loan some legacy loans issued by Local Authorities had a variable interest rate. The current variable interest rate charged on these loans is 4%.

Local authorities borrow from the Housing Finance Agency to finance their lending under the Local Authority Loan schemes. The variable interest rate for the loan schemes is not directly linked to the European Central Bank refinancing rates. That said, as the cost of finance to the Housing Finance Agency is determined by the cost of finance on international markets, the monetary policy decisions of the European Central Bank do ultimately have an influence.

Administratively it is my Department that instructs local authorities to change interest rates, this instruction generally reflects changes in the cost of finance from the Housing Finance Agency, as by law the interest rate charged cannot be below the cost of finance from the Housing Finance Agency.