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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Clare Byrne Show on Newstalk. With Aviva Insurance.
Governments say they're angry and frustrated at local councils for failing on dereliction. So they say they're going to bring in a new tax as part of the upcoming finance bill. The tax will initially apply to properties located in urban areas with populations of 4,000 or more.
Here to tell me more is PhD researcher in spatial planning, Carol Tannell, and executive chairman of Tom Phillips and associates Tom Phillips. You are very welcome to... to the programme. Carol, these proposals, they do represent a pretty significant change, I think, in how Ireland is going to deal with dereliction going forward because we've had a levy.
Chapter 2: What prompted the government to introduce a new Derelict Property Tax?
Now we're talking about a tax that would be operated by the revenue commissioners. How exactly would it operate?
Good morning Ciara and absolutely this is a very deliberate and robust change but I think it's really important to say at the outset that any faux outrage from sitting government is just incredibly unfair on the local authorities that have been under-resourced, disempowered and have been under enormous pressure over recent years. So yes there's a problem but for
sitting government to blame local authorities seems incredibly unhelpful. However, we will take this moving forward as a really positive step. The derelict property tax, as it will be now applied, we're still waiting to know what's the definition of derelict, what is considered underuse. But the reality is, in our towns and cities, we have such, and villages, we've such a high level of underuse
as well as vacancy, as well as dereliction, that actually that's a real slap in the face for our generation of renters or people who can't even get on the rental ladder. So it's a really positive thing. Arguably too late, but it's better now than never. But I think the blame game, we're just past that stage now. Ireland is in a state of a housing emergency.
So it's good to see government pull every lever it has at its disposal to make the available space ready for occupation.
Tom, to talk about that blame game, I'm looking at comments from the Taoiseach Simon Harris when he spoke on this on Sunday. He said local authorities have not done enough to rectify this issue. They have a direct derelict sites levy that they can collect but But he said we've given them extra staff, we've given them extra funding and they haven't done enough on dereliction.
We are going to have to take this over. We can't leave it to the local authorities. They've badly failed with a few notable exceptions, by the way.
Do you agree? I don't, and I agree with Carol about the faux outrage, because the state itself is the owner of many derelict properties, and we don't even have a single register of derelict properties owned by the state. And that could be, well, there's obviously a definition from underutilised and derelict. And derelict has been around for 36 years.
We have a Derelict Sites Act, and the state itself doesn't have a register of all the properties it owns in the first place. And then secondly, it doesn't have a register of all the lands that it has that are gone beyond being underutilised and actually derelict.
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Chapter 3: How will the new Derelict Property Tax be implemented?
So I agree with Carl, it is the wrong
uh metric to look at and to go after the after local authorities that's an easy target i think it's the state to look at itself first and look at all the state-owned property and local authority-owned properties and then look at the private sector because the state in using revenue to chase private owners or property is it's they're very easy targets but what happens when the state itself has got large buildings that are derelict i'll give you an example there's a fantastic building down in dublin docklands in the pigeon house besides the old georgian building which is an old
electricity generation plant, a brick building that was always used in foils as a film set. And it's derelict and it's owned by the state and it's falling down and it's protected structure. Why isn't that building fixed first before you start penalising the private sector who are already dealing with the difficulty moving and enabling and activating developments because it could be under
provision of water, electricity, transport, all those other issues that happen. So the first thing you should do is get a register and publish it of state-owned derelict property, then go after the private sector.
So do you think then this is the wrong move to abolish this levy and to move this over to the revenue commissioners?
I don't. I think it's a rebranding because at the moment it's quite punitive at 7% and it's been around for 36 years. It is under-collected in certain places, but it's also, I would say, more to the fact that it's unevenly distributed across the various local authorities. Some local authorities are very good at keeping up with registers and others aren't.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of the Derelict Property Tax for local authorities?
So, I mean, the Tonish's criticism is not without some weight. I mean, he is correct in certain ways, but I think perhaps it's just the way he's reported in the paper. Maybe he wasn't so binary in it that it is the local authority and nobody else is at fault.
There is a levy for 36 years, but the central point of making, we've got a thing called myplan.ie, which is supposed to track all the local authority developed plans. It's been around since 2014. It's not yet complete. That's the state. You've got a situation where
The state last year brought out apartment guidelines and then it was judicially reviewed and only the other day they brought out a revision. That's like literally took it 12 months to do a revision of a report and that has caused a delay in the development market where people don't know whether to jump left or jump right pending the state getting documents.
So I think that Thomas should look at his own departments first and make sure that his own departments are working at full speed and delivering the documentation that developers need in order to bring forward development.
Carol, it has been very difficult, I think, to get an exact sense of the number of derelict vacant properties within this country. Do we know how many roughly they are and do we know how many have paid this levy since it was first introduced?
Actually, I'm glad you asked about the data. And before I throw out a figure, I no longer trust the data. And I'll give you a very specific reason as to why. Sligo bid, actually recently Sligo, as you may know, is often cited as the part of the town in Ireland with the highest level of commercial vacancy.
And the local businesses and stakeholders came together and said, this just doesn't make sense. It doesn't reflect what we're seeing on the ground. So they actually appointed somebody to physically walk to each of the premises that was showing up on Geodirectory. And in fact, what they discovered was that the data being fed in was based on address points from decades ago.
So actually, where you might have had two families living in an area that was now a commercial building with storage overhead was actually counting as three addresses. So it was completely distorting our dereliction figures. And that simple exercise manually undertaken by Sligo BID shows that actually, and this is not a direct criticism of Geodirectory, it's more...
criticism of us as a nation and how we've handled data. But it also means that we need to be very careful in our data that, one, we are accurately assessing what's going on on the ground. But the second thing is, where a genuine level of dereliction and vacancy is identified, we have to ask why. Why is it so?
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Chapter 5: What challenges do local authorities face regarding dereliction?
Do we also need to look at the supports and the grants that are available to people to bring these derelict houses back into supply, that these are accessible to people, realistic for people?
Yes, and I'm glad you said accessible as opposed to the value, because actually the value of our grants is quite strong. The process to be able to avail of them is really poor. And in fact, this particular one, the derelict property tax, where you're targeting, you know, particularly vacancy over shop units and things like that, there's some really big gaps in how people can engage properly.
in order to avail of a grant so for example at the moment they're only open to individuals whereas actually in villages and towns and many in the city as well these buildings are owned by small business owners and they might be held by a company the company is not in a position to avail of that so these are the kind of things that are foreseeable and that our policy should be addressing but we're just so slow to take we need to we need to almost try every wrong avenue before we can um
see the right avenue and it's a real frustration given the scale of the emergency and the urgency around it. So actually one of the things we'd like to see moved quickly that is already being mooted and that is an initial feasibility study that would be available to the owner of a building whether it's a company or an individual to say if it's underused, if it's derelict, why is it so?
And is it viable to bring back in line with current and appropriate building standards and regulations? And even that initial feasibility, that's something that the government could fund that would move us in the right direction very quickly.
There's lots of texts coming in on this subject, which probably won't surprise anybody. Will members of the public be able to report properties to revenue? As Derelict asks one person, will there be exemptions for people who are actively trying to refurbish a property or sell a property or remortgage a property and having difficulty? What do you think, Frank?
It's Tom, sorry.
It's Tom, excuse me.
Well, I agree, but the definition of derelict is already around for 36 years in the 1990 Derelict Sites Act. And so that is, and in certain places, it's a matter of just making it, of tidying up a property. It doesn't have to be an active use, but it's just making it not look unsightly, which itself is a subjective analysis. So that is already in place and has been around for some time.
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