Rating (Empty Properties) Bill

I am grateful for that intervention—and, as the Minister said, well spotted. That is a good point. It suggests that six months is a minimum reasonable period in any such situation. It seems odd to have a period of three months. The Financial Secretary did not offer a justification for that when opening the debate; perhaps the Minister for Local Government will do so in his response. I hope that the other speeches are long enough to ensure that he has time to receive the information that he needs. In areas where regeneration is needed, the development of commercial property—whether office or industrial—is often done on a speculative basis. Property developers will develop a series of industrial units on the basis that they can see a commercial opportunity. They may have acquired some land and heard a suggestion from the local authority that business parks in the area might help to promote the economy. I am worried. Will the new tax regime in the Bill discourage that sort of speculative property regeneration, on the basis that the developer will be in a less advantageous tax position while the properties lie empty? That question has to be answered. That raises a further point. Is the proposed new rating regime a tax on change? It takes time to change the use of a property. It takes time to refurbish a property and it can often take an inordinate amount of time to get the relevant planning permissions in place, although that varies across the country. I represent Inverness, which is the fastest-growing city in the United Kingdom. In locations that are growing quickly, or areas that are changing in the opposite direction and where the economy is contracting, there should be an incentive to encourage people to change the use of their business premises—perhaps moving from factory to retail, office to retail, or retail to domestic use. Planning changes and refurbishment are required in those circumstances. All those things take time—potentially quite a lot more time than the three or six months allowed in the legislation. When he responds, will the Minister address the concern that the proposal will discourage the sort of business changes in local economies that need to be encouraged as cities, towns or local areas grow? Although I would not suggest this, at its most pejorative, the measure effectively means that businesses will be faced with a new tax while the planning system delays their projects. The hon. Member for Salisbury (Robert Key) made an excellent speech on rural communities during the Ways and Means debate. There are serious aspects of the measure that will affect rural areas, rather than urban areas. I would be especially grateful to hear from the Minister the efforts that the Government made to rural-proof the Bill before bringing it forward. It is supposed to be common practice that all legislation is rural-proofed. If there is documentation on the rural-proofing of the measure, I hope that the Minister will place it in the Library so that all Members concerned can read that information. Those of us who represent rural constituencies know that changing economic circumstances might necessitate, for example, the conversion of a hotel into flats, which happened in a village in my constituency relatively recently. Again, that process takes a great deal of time.