Sinn Féin has said that a relief on Capital Gains Tax, for properties purchased between 2011 and 2014, is offering an incentive for owners to sell.

The measure was first introduced in Budget 2012 and amended thereafter.

It gave owners who bought during that period 100% relief on Capital Gains Tax if they held that property for four to seven years. After that period the level of relief tapered downwards.

Sinn Féin’s Finance spokesperson Pearse Doherty has said that owners can therefore still avail of significant savings and he believes it could be incentivising some landlords to sell their rental properties.

However, the Department of Finance has said that research indicates that landlords are selling for other reasons.

The measure was introduced to incentivise activity in the property market when the economy was struggling.

It has since been expanded to allow those that purchased land and buildings between 2011 and 2014, and held them for between four to seven years, to avail of 100% relief on Capital Gains Tax.

That relief tapered off after the seventh year. 2021 was therefore the final year to avail of the full benefit.

The Department of Finance however said that “regardless of whether the relief was in place landlords may have chosen for other reasons to exit the rental market” in recent years.

It cited a recent Residential Tenancies Board survey of landlords, which found that their main reason for leaving was because they “don’t want to be a landlord anymore”.

Labour had to put down no-confidence motion – Bacik

Meanwhile, Labour Party Leader Ivana Bacik has said her party felt they had no choice but to put down a motion of no-confidence in the Government.

Speaking to RTÉ’s The Week In Politics, she said: “We believe we have no choice because this Government has taken a deliberate and conscious decision that will have the result of putting more people in homelessness, because they did not use the breathing space over the last five months within which we had an eviction ban in place in order to put in place necessary contingency measures to ensure there would be enough housing for people to be able to move on to if and when they were evicted.”

Today on #RTETWIP:

“Well, we felt we had no choice but to put down this motion of no-confidence in government,” says @labour Party Leader @ivanabacik.#RTETWIP will repeat tonight at 18:30 PM and 22:00 PM on the RTÉ News Channel, and 23:15 PM on @RTEOne. pic.twitter.com/WRXTZ3igZb

— The Week in Politics (@rtetwip) March 26, 2023

She said the Government has had a catastrophic failure on housing.

Labour has promised to build one million homes in ten years, when asked about how this can be delivered, Ms Bacik said the figure does sound large, but it is the figure that is needed.

She said: “We are talking about 50,000 new builds a year for ten years and 50,000 deep retrofit and refurbishment of vacant properties, that is the scale of ambition that is needed simply to address the need in this country.”

Asked how those houses would be built, Ms Bacik said that the level of ambition and energy that was put into combatting the pandemic.

She said that in Dublin alone there are 30,000 live panning permissions already granted but are inactive and she said he outlines how this issue can be addressed at the Labour Party Conference yesterday.

Ms Bacik added: “One of the measures I proposed last night was to introduce a new use it or lose it rule.

“The developers could not sit on live planning permissions for residential homes in rent property zones.”