Non-Domestic Rating (Lists) (No. 2) Bill

Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 18th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Randerson (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I wish to concentrate solely on the Non-Domestic Rating (Public Lavatories) Bill and, in doing so, express my regret that these two Bills have been harnessed together. They may sound similar, but their impact is very different. I declare an interest as a member of an, as yet, informal campaign group trying to improve the quality of public toilets through the introduction of a toilet hygiene rating scheme.

I will start with a quote:

“The main results from the enquiry are 1) the quite inadequate free provision for women. This is perhaps the most outstanding defect at present existing in London in relation to this important matter.”


The inquiry referred to was undertaken in 1928 by the London County Council. This inequality was made worse by the Public Health Act 1936, which allowed providers of public toilets to charge women but not men for using facilities. That particular injustice stopped in 2008, but the inequalities in provision for women continue. Indeed, official advice from the Health and Safety Executive on workplace toilets still embodies this discrimination, setting in print a recommendation for a ratio of male to female facilities which greatly favours men.

It is a biological fact that it takes a woman approximately twice as long to use a toilet as a man. In addition, an average woman has approximately 480 periods in her lifetime, each lasting three to seven days. Some 14 million people in the UK are estimated to have some kind of bladder dysfunction. Women are more prone to this than men, because of the impact of childbirth. I share with very many women a lifelong sense of injustice that we are continually disadvantaged in this way. When did you ever see a queue outside the gents’ toilets? Modern changes of attitude recognise the argument for gender-neutral facilities, but sadly these are sometimes being provided only with the loss of facilities for women. Women from some faith and cultural backgrounds find it simply impossible to share facilities with men.

Of course, this is not the only shortcoming in our public toilets. There are still far too few changing places toilets, as my noble friend Lady Thomas referred to, with both the space and the high standard of hygiene required for severely disabled people and their carers. There are too few well-appointed toilets for disabled people generally. I also want to make a complaint on behalf of fathers. Far too many sets of public conveniences assume that all childcare is done by women, so baby-changing facilities are in the women’s toilets. Men on their own with children often face an impossible dilemma on where to change their child’s nappy.

I have campaigned on these issues since the 1980s and clearly I have failed, because the number of public toilets has dwindled. When the public complain that their cleanliness and condition are poor, local authorities facing financial problems find that the easy solution—the only solution—is to shut them down.

The Covid crisis has heightened awareness of these issues. First, we all became aware of the need for the highest standards of cleanliness. Combined with pressures on staffing, this posed a dilemma for local authorities, which too often simply shut them up completely. Over the years, as the number of council-run facilities has dwindled, we have increasingly relied on toilets in shops, pubs and cafés, but these have been shut for large parts of the last year. This led to some pretty horrifying situations, which hit the headlines when the Prime Minister suddenly decreed that we could all drive as far as we wanted for our exercise. It was midsummer and the weather was lovely. Hundreds of thousands of people set off for the coast without considering whether there were toilets for them to use during their day out. That incident revealed that good, clean public toilets are an important part of our tourist industry.

This legislation is obviously a good, sensible provision, and I support it, but it is not going to solve any of the problems I have outlined. I note that the estimated cost will be £6 million in England and £450,000 in Wales, which will hardly make up the financial deficit which has reduced the availability of good public toilets over the years. The Minister outlined other initiatives that the Government are taking to improve public toilet provision. We clearly need many more of them. The community toilet scheme that he mentioned started in Wales well over a decade ago, so it is good to see England catching up with this excellent initiative. It is now time for stricter requirements and standards. I note that the provisions of the Bill will not apply to toilets which are part of a larger unit; for example, in a public library. Why not, if they are open for public use? My local public library has the only public toilets for at least a mile and a half in all directions. That restriction seems unnecessary.

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

Can the noble Baroness bring her comments to a close shortly please?

[Baroness Randerson (LD) [V]]

It is definitely not in the spirit of the Minister’s speech, which emphasised how imaginative the Government have been in approaching this issue.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Stunell (LD) [V]]

My Lords, the non-domestic rating Bill is a simple Bill but it has some important ramifications that I want the Minister to clarify in this debate.

The first point I want to explore is how the Government intend to compensate local authorities for the income lost through the current Covid-19 emergency rates rebates, particularly for retail premises. As the Minister himself said, that has cost around £10 billion in this financial year, and it is at least a possibility that there will be some extension of that rebate system into the next year. My first question to the Minister is therefore: who is carrying the burden of that shortfall? Are the Chancellor and the Treasury making up the missing income so that local authorities do not lose out on the redistribution, or is the payout to the fund being cut and the damage borne by local authorities? The Minister may feel that that is outside the scope of the Bill, but that matter is very relevant to the point I shall explore in just a minute or two.

The Bill is the end product of a yo-yo policy-making process by the Government. Plan A was to reduce the review periods to every three years with a review date in 2022. That was changed to an intention to bring the review forward to 2021, to tackle the increasing evidence that outdated valuations were producing more and more unfair burdens for some—especially high-street retailers—and unearned tax holidays for others, especially distribution centres and out-of-town warehouses.

However, we now have a Bill that is to be effective from 2023, which is one year later than the original plan A and two years later than plan B. The Bill, plan C, avoids carrying out revaluation surveys until the Covid-19 pandemic is over—we sincerely hope. That makes sense in the current circumstances; it is not an issue for me at least. But the crucial point that remains is for how long hard-pressed retailers will be left paying exorbitant rates for rapidly depreciating high-street locations. How soon will they get the relief they so desperately need? One unintended result of the switch from plan B to plan C could be that that relief will be delayed by up to two years—a point the noble Lord, Lord Reid of Cardowan, made eloquently.

One key to this may be the antecedent valuation date, or AVD. That is the baseline date from which assessing the rental values will be made. I am indebted to the Association of Convenience Stores for its briefing on that topic. The first part of the briefing welcomes a proposed AVD of 1 April this year because the ACS believes that would allow full account to be taken of the steep decline in retail values and would give its members smaller rates bills to pay. The second part makes a case for the urgent extension of the rates relief scheme into the coming year because of the continuing impact of Covid-19 on its businesses. Indeed, it says in its evidence that four out of 10 of its members would have gone out of business without that support this year, so it has been absolutely critical.

The Bill is running two years later than the Government originally intended. There must not be a two-year delay in bringing the benefits of an updated valuation to the retail sector, which has been left on its knees, not just by Covid-19 but by underlying trends in retail purchasing that were already in train but have been hugely accelerated as a result of it.

If the revaluation is done this year and comes into force only in 2023—and, even worse, if there is any kind of a transition period that delays any benefits to it—the retail industry, already struggling desperately, will be left high and dry between the end of the Chancellor’s scheme and their incoming reduced rates bills. That brings me back to the working of the current retail rate relief system. If the Chancellor has acknowledged the acute pressures facing retail businesses by granting them business rates relief, and if he pays heed to what the Association of Convenience Stores and many others have had to say about extending that scheme, surely there has to be some joined-up thinking across government departments. It cannot make any sense for there to be a critical gap of two years, possibly more, between the end of the Chancellor’s scheme and the delayed implementation of the rates revaluation, given that that review is to be based on an AVD of 1 April this year.

Can the Minister confirm that the AVD will indeed be on 1 April and that he will strongly resist any idea of phasing in the reliefs granted by the revaluation beyond 2023, which would delay the benefit to the retail sector even further? Will he explore any available options for implementing at least some parts of the revaluation at an earlier date than April 2023 so that their full impact will immediately be available sooner, to the retail sector in particular? The public lavatories Bill has a backdated provision granting retrospective tax relief from 2020, so the concept will not be unfamiliar to him. Will he consider introducing a similar provision for the retail rebates in this Bill as well?

Finally, if an early start is not an option, will he work with the Chancellor to provide appropriate transitional support to that sector between the end of the Chancellor’s scheme—that is, the current support package—and the new valuations taking effect? It would be folly for what is now a two-year delay in the original timetable proposed by the Government, which would lead to a near-fatal blow to our high streets—

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

I remind the noble Lord of the advisory speaking limit.