Cost competitiveness & regulatory burden

Cost competitiveness remains a critical business priority. While acknowledging the Government's progress in lowering business costs over the past 12 months, we must continue proactive engagement to ensure they understand and address ongoing cost pressures facing businesses nationwide.

Excessive or unnecessary regulation undermines competitiveness and growth. The Government has commenced work to review business regulation and committed to reducing regulatory burdens for companies, we must ensure that this work is completed and addressed as soon as possible.

Given the significant cost competitiveness challenges, the following recommendations will help the most exposed businesses operating on tight margins to future-proof the sector's viability and maintain jobs. Ibec is calling for:

• Introduce a Pay Related Social Insurance (PRSI) rebate, including increasing the top-rate employer PRSI threshold above the new Living Wage annually and the introduction of a temporary PRSI rebate based on the number of lower earning workers on a company’s payroll will help business mitigate labour costs.
• Ibec support the view that 9% VAT for the Experience Economy sector is the optimum long-term VAT rate for the sector and we will lobby Government to achieve this rate over time.
• Reject the introduction of a hotel bed night tax/transient visitor levy currently being proposed by some local authorities. Ibec believes such a proposal represents triple taxation as taxation of hotel beds is already captured under both commercial rates and VAT.