Councillors in Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council will this evening be considering whether or not to raise the Local Property Tax (LPT) for the residents of the County.
People Before Profit councillors Hugh Lewis and Melisa Halpin will put a motion calling on government to abolish the LPT and replace it with a landlord tax that is graduated according to the number of properties that the landlord owns.
The Local Property Tax is set each year according to the valuation of domestic property with each Council having the final say on how much house owners are charged. The LPT was introduced by central government with the tag line of “Funding your local services”. Since its introduction the overall budget available to Dún Laoghaire has gone from €220 million in 2008 to €183 million in 2019. This is because the money that used to come from the central government fund has been drastically reduced as a direct result of the introduction of the LPT.
Speaking in advance of the meeting Cllr Hugh Lewis said:
“The LPT is a regressive tax that takes absolutely no consideration of income or personal wealth and has resulted in less funds being available to fund local services, we cannot continue as public representatives to tax low income families whilst simultaneously accepting less funding for the operations of our councils.”
Richard Boyd Barrett TD said:
“It is time that we united against this regressive tax that has done nothing but concretize less available funding for our services and hits some of our poorest families the hardest.”
