Yesterday, the budget announcement regarding the defective concrete blocks levy smacked of an ill-timed, ill-judged decision. It is expected this levy will raise €80 million annually. It will commence on 3 April 2023. The levy will result in a 10% increase in the cost of concrete, concrete materials, sills, lintels, hollow-core floor slabs and concrete blocks. At a time when thriving inflation within the construction industry is creating havoc for young people who are trying to build their own houses and for local authorities that are trying to build social housing, this will add to the overall cost of the building of all infrastructure in this country. The levy will bring in €80 million net per annum, according to the announcement yesterday, but it will not penalise people who did wrong. Rather, it will impose an additional cost on people who are trying to build or buy their own homes and trying not to be a burden on the State.

I ask the Taoiseach to think about this matter on the basis that the Government is putting additional inflation into the construction market. It is going to add further costs to all public works contracts by increasing the cost of a vital component that is used on every building site and in every civil engineering contract in this country, as well as in housing construction. It baffles me to think that this is being introduced at a time when we are trying to curb inflation. There is no doubt that every concrete supplier in this country will add the cost to its sales. Suppliers will not take it on themselves. It is wrong for young people and the taxpayer to be asked to pay for this when the cost of building a house has risen by €40,000 or €50,000 in the past 12 months. The Government is proposing to add at least another €2,000 onto that additional cost. It is a penal levy on young people and others trying to do something on their own.

Again, I do not think it is fair to look at that in isolation. I would point out the enormous supports the Government is giving to young people in respect of affordable housing. More than €1.3 billion of investment will support an overall package of measures to deliver thousands of affordable houses next year by helping people buy and rent at an affordable rate, such as the first-home affordable purchase shared equity scheme that has been introduced, with €50 million allocated to that. There will be close to 1,000 cost-rental homes, most of which will be delivered by approved housing bodies, and further funding has been given by the State to enable that to happen. There is also the Land Development Agency, LDA, investment of €600 million for 2023, which will support the targeted delivery of 1,400 cost-rental and affordable purchase homes, and the €250 million for lending under the local authority home loan scheme, under which more than €471 million has been lent out in recent years. All of that is helping and the State is getting involved, not to mention the help-to-buy scheme, which has supported 35,000 buyers to date. The State is in there, supporting people in terms of affordability.

In the context of the concrete levy, the Deputy will be aware that when the Government took a decision in November 2021 in regard to a range of actions to deal with the defective blocks issue, everybody in the House wanted the most comprehensive of packages to deal with the problems caused by mica specifically. The cost of that at the time was estimated at about €2.8 billion, which the Government agreed to take on. Similarly, the pyrite interventions have, since 2013, probably cost close to €1 billion and there is another €500 million or €600 million to go on that scheme. Yesterday, the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage brought forward a memorandum to Government on apartment defects that outlined the scale of the issues, with up to 100,000 apartments potentially impacted. He will bring forward proposals on a scheme before the end of the year to help people remediate these units and to help the homeowners concerned. All in all, if we take the three schemes into account, we are looking at an intervention by the State of somewhere between €4 billion and €6 billion on these issues. The view was taken at the time of the mica intervention - this was signalled at the time - that some element of sustainability would have to be built into this in the form of future revenue streams to meet this enormous cost into the future. Hence, there was the idea of a defective concrete products levy. I accept the Deputy's point that not everybody in the sector engaged in this, but in the insurance industry, levies came in for many decades to deal with rogue behaviour as well. There is a challenge there for everybody in terms of meeting the needs of the homeowners.

The Taoiseach mentioned mica, pyrite and apartment defects. The core problem here is that we do not have effective building control. Until we bring in a system of proper building control, we will continue to put billions of euro into the rectification of problems with innocent people's properties. I do not believe the cure for this problem is to put a levy on young people who are trying to build houses. Ironically, the public purse will be used to pay the additional costs on public sector contracts arising from this levy. The Government will pay out money for the additional costs on houses to local authorities to build them. I agree that help is there and I welcome the fact that the help-to-buy scheme has been extended for another year, although it should be expanded to second-hand houses. Leaving that aside, there is something fundamentally flawed with bringing in this levy at this time. It will do nothing to cure the problem we have and the rogue operations that are there. That is where the problem lies, and it is where the solution lies as well.

I agree the problem lies with the rogue behaviour. The core issue is people's bad behaviour in providing such defective materials. It fundamentally comes down to trust in people who build houses. I think everyone would have to acknowledge the scale of the intervention, which is a generous intervention by the State because we want to help people keep a roof over their head, given their first investment in their house or apartment is one they made in good faith. The levy will not, in any shape or form, ever raise the kind of revenue the State will spend on dealing with the impact caused by whoever was involved in or responsible for the supply of defective materials. The revenue raised by this will go nowhere near the cost that will be incurred by the taxpayer. Equally, a clear message has to go out that such behaviour has costs.