Where the owner of a residential property is a charity or a body established by statute and the property is used solely or primarily to provide special needs accommodation – that is accommodation provided to persons who by reason of old age, physical or mental disability or other cause require special accommodation and support to enable them to live in the community – that residential property will be exempt from the charge to the Local Property Tax. While non-profit housing associations engage in the provision of special needs housing, they also provide general needs housing in the same way as a local authority provides such housing. Most of their funding is provided by local authorities, the tenants are taken from local authorities’ waiting lists and a similar type of differential rents system applies. Depending on the level of local authority funding provided, some non-profit housing associations may have flexibility to provide housing for those not eligible for local authority housing. To provide for a blanket exemption for such bodies would obviously be inequitable vis-à-vis local authority tenants. For this reason I decided not to accept the recommendation in the Thornhill report that all charitable bodies should be exempt but to restrict the exemption to those properties that are used to provide special needs accommodation.
However, I acknowledge that government policy places significant emphasis on the approved housing body sector as an important part of social housing supply in the future. The Government will actively engage with Approved Housing Bodies to ensure that the Local Property Tax does not impact on their ability to deliver housing units.