Promises on Housing and Stamp Duty

Election promises on Housing and Stamp Duty

Fianna Fail

• Abolish stamp duty for first-time buyers and make it retrospective to 30 April 2007.
• Increase mortgage interest relief for first-time buyers and recent buyers to €10,000 for singles and €20,000 for couples or widowed persons from January 2008.
• Expand delivery of social and affordable housing to meet needs of 90,000 families.  
• Achieve a fall in numbers of homeless.  
•  Extend remit of the Affordable Homes Partnership nationwide.  
•  Regenerate problem estates through Sustainable Communities Fund.

Fine Gael  / Labour

• Raise the stamp-duty exemption limit for first-time buyers of second-hand homes to €450,000.
• Simplify stamp-duty rates by reducing the number of rates from seven to three. The new rates will be zero per cent, five per cent and nine per cent.
• Make stamp duty fairer so that you only pay the higher rate on the portion of the price over each threshold and not on the entire purchase price. Under Fine Gael's proposals, the first €100,000 is zero rated, the next €350,000 is paid at five per cent and the balance is charged at nine per cent.

Labour (solely)

• 10,000 social-housing units.
• A new “Begin to Buy” purchase option. Will enable people to start purchasing a home when in full-time employment, allowing them to increase equity in the home as incomes increase.
• 6,000 affordable homes each year.
• Compulsory purchase of bulding land in “affordability black-spots”.
• No surplus state-owned land, which is intended for housing, to be sold into the private market.

Greens

• Relief on stamp duty should be extended for older persons who are ‘downsizing' and for first-time buyers.
• Give pre-emption rights to local authorities to purchase property at point of sale and make more active use of existing compulsory-purchase powers.
• Progressively limit the amount of money that lending institutions can lend for house purchase.
• 10,000 social-housing units per year until the waiting lists are clear. 

Sinn Fein 

• A National Housing Strategy and a National Housing Agency to provide housing with a target of supplying suitable accommodation within two years for 70 per cent of applicants on the waiting lists.
• An increase in capital-gains tax on speculative owners of multiple dwellings, introduced over two years. • A statutory ceiling on the price of land zoned for housing.
 • Compulsory purchase orders on landowners sitting on land banks and derelict property.
• The creation of a Minister for Housing.
• Integrated strategy for homelessness with a target of 70 per cent reduction within two years. 

 PDs

• Abolish stamp duty for first-time buyers.
• Reduce the burden of stamp duty on owner-occupiers and reduce the unfairness of the current system caused by the lack of tapering relief. • No need to reduce stamp duty for professional investors.
• Make stamp duty fairer by banding rates so that owner-occupiers pay the higher rate only on the portion of the price over each threshold.
• Deliver social housing for 60,000 new households.

Socialist Party

• No to 40-year mortgages where people pay up to three times the cost of their home to the banks.
• Scrap stamp duty.
• End management company rip-off.
• End local authority waiting lists. An emergency state building programme to provide social housing for all who need it.