Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Debate between Lord Blunkett and Lord Moylan

Committee stage
Monday 20th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Lytton. I will speak briefly and narrowly to the point made earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Foster, in which he argued for a national registration scheme rather than one which, as the noble Earl said, the Built Environment Committee said should be available locally and at local option. The noble Lord’s reason was that having a national registration scheme would make it easier for the Government to gather large amounts of data. That is a very weak reason for what would be an astonishing intrusion into privacy and the rights of property.

I believe the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, said that a national scheme was preferable because it could be implemented more quickly than one implemented by a local authority.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

That was not me.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

I beg the noble Lord’s pardon, but I heard those remarks made. I am simply saying that I do not believe that point; any scheme implemented by the Government at a national level will take a very long time to bring forward, whereas in my experience a local authority, duly empowered and with sufficient interest in the matter, could act more quickly.

One of the important findings of the Built Environment Committee was that this problem exists, as the noble Earl said, in very localised areas. We need to understand the problem if we are to find the solution, and so we need to understand the very important localism and find locally tailored solutions rather than rush into a national scheme which would be applied to the whole country and would involve a great deal of resource being spent to no particular purpose. As the noble Earl said, we will have the opportunity to return to this on group 10, whether this evening or on our next day.

As certain noble Lords have said, there is an anomaly in the taxation of properties, depending on how they are declared. If they are declared to be residential, they are liable to domestic council tax like anybody else, but if they are declared to be in business use, which is what an Airbnb-type property might be, they pay business rates. However, business rates are not paid by anything other than quite large businesses; very small businesses do not have to pay them. Therefore, by declaring oneself for business rates, one then qualifies for threshold exemptions that are not available for domestic council tax payers. Effectively, one escapes any form of tax on the property at all.

That is clearly an anomaly about which it would be worthwhile the Government thinking, but it seems to me that the right way to address it is to change the tax rules rather than introduce a large distortion in the property market. It is giving us a solution at the wrong end; if the problem is with the tax rules, it would be better and easier to remove the anomaly from them. However, we will have an opportunity to return to this later.