Rating (Empty Properties) Bill

As always, I am grateful to the Minister for his useful point. I assure him that my aversion to algebraic formulae knows no party boundary, and I suspect that the 1988 Act did not commence in the same stunning fashion as this Bill. What concerns me is that there is a feeling among many people, and certainly among my constituents, the Federation of Small Businesses notwithstanding, that the Bill is essentially a revenue-generating exercise. The Financial Secretary to the Treasury, with his usual reasonableness and skill, said, ““No, this is essentially a regeneration exercise, and a supply-enhancing exercise””, but some of us are rather sceptical about that given the way in which the measure has come about. There is a real worry among many of my constituents, particularly those with small businesses, about what lies behind that algebraic formula. Hon. Members in all parties have drawn attention to the situation in London and the south-east. If the Bill is a regeneration exercise, it is a high-risk strategy that the Government have embarked on. Those risks have been mentioned by every speaker in the debate, except those on the Treasury Bench. I hope that, as the Bill makes progress, Ministers will flesh out what they intend to do to ameliorate and mitigate those risks. It was suggested earlier that the Bill was designed to tackle the particular situation in London, and the Financial Secretary referred to the vacant property rates in London and one or two other places. As I endeavoured to point out when I intervened and as I shall elaborate, even to me as a London Member of Parliament the situation in London is not entirely straightforward. There is a huge difference between the highly charged economy of the west end and the City of London, which is financial-services dominated and where property and rental values have been driven up for a raft of reasons, and the economy of other boroughs in the city. That applies to suburban areas such as mine, and also to some of the inner-city boroughs, where there is a real regeneration issue. That is why the concerns expressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) and others about the effect of the Bill on regeneration activities are well founded. The Financial Secretary spoke about the worryingly—from his point of view—and, I assume, the unacceptably high vacancy rates of 16 per cent. in the City of London. He might take comfort, for his argument, from the thought that according to the published statistics that has broadly doubled since 1998. That is by no means the whole picture in London. The London borough of Newham has vacancy rates of some 14 per cent. That figure has remained consistent throughout the nine or 10-year period, so it cannot be suggested that in Newham there has been a speculative holding on to vacant sites because of the potential from, say, the Olympic development. The situation existed long before that possibility arose. In Hackney, for example, there has been a fluctuation from 30 per cent. at the start of the period down to 20 per cent. and back to 28 per cent. The vacancy rates have always been stubbornly above the 20 per cent. level, which indicates that there are a raft of reasons or high levels of vacancy. The reasons why it is difficult to get commercial premises let and occupied in Newham and Hackney are very different from those causing premises to be vacant in the City of London or Westminster. Unless significant exemptions and safeguards are built in, perhaps by the regulations, about which we have not heard much at this stage, the Government’s approach may be a blunt instrument that does as much damage in some quarters as it seeks to do good in others. In my London borough of Bromley, we have a vacancy rate of some 4 per cent. That has fallen from its high of 6 per cent. We are pleased that that is a comparatively low vacancy rate. I hasten to add that that is in no insignificant measure due to the enlightened policies of the Conservative-controlled London borough of Bromley council, working with our private sector partners. The master plan that we have just published for Bromley town centre will, I hope, build on that. I know from my time in local government, and I agree with the Government on this, that many local authorities seek to encourage commercial development. That is why, as the Minister knows, I favour a return of the business rate to incentivise local authorities in that regard. However, that is not the whole picture. I know from taking a walk up my high street that, even in Bromley, although we have a thriving centre around the Glades and the southern part of the high street, that 4 per cent. vacancy rate masks the fact that there is almost complete occupation at one end but a much higher rate at the northern end of the town centre, for example, where smaller premises usually owned by individual landlords are struggling to compete because the trade is drawn further south.