Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 21 November 2017
146. Deputy Brendan Howlin asked the Minister for Finance when the report of the working group on the tax and fiscal treatment of rental accommodation providers, expected to be submitted to him in July 2017, will be published; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [48924/17]
View answerThe Strategy for the Rental Sector, published in December 2016, contained a commitment to establish a Working Group to examine and report on the tax treatment of landlords (or rental accommodation providers), and to put forward, where appropriate, options for amendments to such treatment. The Working Group was chaired by the Department of Finance and its membership included officials from the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government (DHPLG), Revenue and the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB).
The final report of the Working Group was published on Budget day, 10 October 2017, and it is available on the Budget 2018 website at the following link: http://www.budget.gov.ie/Budgets/2018/Documents/Report_of_the_Working_Group_on_the_Tax_and_Fiscal_Treatment_of_Landlords.pdf .
It is also available on the Department of Finance website at the following link: http://www.finance.gov.ie/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/171010-Report-of-the-Working-Group-on-theTax-and-Fiscal-Treatment-of-Landlords.pdf.
The Report of the Working Group includes 10 options for consideration for implementation in the short, medium and long-term. As I announced in my Budget speech, I have introduced one of the short-term options in this year’s Finance Bill. It is a new time-limited deduction against rental income for pre-letting expenditure incurred on a residential premises that has been vacant for a year or more. The purpose of the measure is to encourage owners of vacant residential property to bring that property into the rental market, for a minimum of four years, thereby increasing the overall supply of residential accommodation.
