Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:14 pm on 13 February 2018.
I thank Simon Thomas very much for those questions, and I thank him for Plaid Cymru's support for testing the new system that we have, and to keep an eye on the vacant land tax and how we use that to test the new system. On the one question that Simon Thomas raised on that tax, in Ireland, the tax goes to every person and authority responsible for the vacant land, whether it's in the Government's hands or the local government's hands or anything else in the public sector, because what they say is, if the local authority, for example, isn't doing its work to use the land, where they've been given the permissions and so on to develop that land, well, they're in the same position as any other individual. Now, I'll be going to Ireland, hopefully, next week, and I hope there will be an opportunity for me to meet with those people responsible for that tax once again, and be able to drill down in greater detail on issues such as the question that Simon Thomas posed this afternoon.
To turn to the questions on the written statement, of course, many of the taxes that we're talking about will have an impact on behaviour rather than on revenue raising. That is true of the vacant land tax, because what they say in Ireland is that they don't expect to generate a great deal of revenue, but they do wish to change the behaviour of people who are just sitting on land and not using the land for important purposes in Ireland.