Planning Policy

: No. The right-to-buy policy was an extremely good policy, which created much more viable and vibrant communities. The problem now is how to create new social housing. There is an opportunity in historic town centres, but there is a difficulty. Many of the empty shops belong to property companies and retail consortiums and appear on their balance sheets as an asset value. It is often easier for them to hold those properties as an asset value than to develop them. I hope that the Minister will consider my first suggestion, which is that if property companies that own empty retail space in historic town centres are prepared to sell it for social housing, they should have relief from capital gains tax. That would be a real incentive for them to vacate the sites and to make them available to social landlords for housing for young people and elderly people, who would find it useful to live in town centres. Secondly, practically every top-floor flat over a shop in Banbury High street and Parson street is empty. Historically, when the shops were built the shopkeeper would live above the shop, but that does not happen now; the space is, at best, storage space, but more often it is empty. I know that at different times there have been attempts to encourage developers and social landlords to take on flats above shops, but that does not seem to have worked, so and perhaps we could provide an incentive whereby if owners of shops were prepared to make the flats above them available, they could have some relief from corporation tax. There is a precedent for that: if any of us have lodgers in our house we can take rent of up to £3,000 tax-free. The same incentive would encourage businesses to make flats above shops available, particularly to young people. These days, young people can usually only get into housing through the private rented sector with the benefit of housing benefit. Making sites in town centres available would be good news. Towns like Banbury have a number of historic buildings, but there is no protection for those historic buildings in the planning system. The listed building system protects buildings of architectural interest, but it does not protect buildings of historic interest such as the Banbury cake house, the shop that sold Banbury cakes. The old Banbury police station, which was demolished recently, was not of great architectural interest, but was of great historic interest in the market town. The Spencer corset factory was a wonderful 1920s art deco building that could easily have been converted into flats, but it was a lot cheaper for the developers to knock it down and start again. The same was true of the gardener's house of the People's park. I pay tribute to Banbury Civic Society, which tried hard to persuade the district council not to grant planning permission to demolish those properties, but the council clearly feels, as my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield said, that planning law and guidance ties its hands. I suggest to the Minister that we and, perhaps, civic societies throughout the country need to give thought to whether we need a designation—even if it were rarely used—of buildings of historic interest. Perhaps there could be a limit on the number of buildings that a local authority could declare to be of historic interest, but any historic market town will have several icon buildings of historic importance to the community, which, if they were to go, would leave a kind of ersatz streetscape. One town would look exactly like another, which would be a source of considerable sadness. I do not have a solution to the last issue that I want to raise with the Minister. Often, district councils make intelligent proposals on developing and improving a town centre. For example, in 1995, Cherwell district council commissioned an urban design study by Roger Evans Associates on how the hole that had developed in the historic core of Banbury could be replaced and repaired by rebuilding the historic street frontage. It considered a mixed-use allocation, and the district council went through all the necessary planning steps, including a detailed policy in the non-statutory Cherwell local plan and so on. The difficulty is that some landowners who own bits of derelict land—perhaps part of a car park, whatever—in various parts of the historic town have no incentive to develop them. They can sit on their land indefinitely, in the hope that some day a better planning opportunity may arise. Clearly, one cannot compulsorily purchase all the land, so there must be a carrot to encourage landowners who are sitting on key sites in historic town centres to develop those sites. I acknowledge that the mechanism may be difficult, but there must be some way to do that. Otherwise, the most tardy, unimaginative landowner can hold back imaginative town centre historic redevelopment, which would restore the townscape. My message to the Minister is that we cannot hold back new retail development. Sainsbury's, Tesco and Morrisons are popular because people want to shop there.