Lord Hope of Craighead (CB) [V]

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My Lords, I have a great deal of sympathy for what the noble Lords, Lord Kennedy of Southwark, Lord Greaves and Lord Lucas, have said in support of these amendments. For some people, venturing into parts of our urban communities where they cannot be sure of access to a public lavatory is a risk that they dare not take. The physical conditions that create this problem can affect all ages. One thinks especially of the elderly, but there are also visitors to the area and others who depend on the uncertainties of public transport to get home. Whoever they are, they need to be provided for.

My interest in this subject, as I have mentioned before, is a professional one. I am interested in whether the amendments to test alternative solutions to those which the Government are suggesting are capable of being put into effect. The valuation of buildings for rating was one of my specialist subjects when I was in practice at the Scottish Bar. The valuation process itself was not for me; that was the job of chartered surveyors. The noble Earl, Lord Lytton, is a distinguished member of that profession, with years of experience in the practice of that art, and I am very sorry that for other reasons he is unable to take part in this debate.

However, valuation for rating is not just about facts and figures. There are some legal rules too, and that is where I come in. The non-domestic rating system is the product of a listing process. Every non-domestic hereditament that is capable of separate occupation must be entered in the valuation list and given a value. A single building may contain within it a number of properties that are in separate occupation. If so, one would expect each of them to be the subject of a separate entry and a separate value, but where one finds a building in a single occupation, the consequence is that the entire building is treated as a separate hereditament and valued accordingly.

Lord Hope of Craighead (CB) [V]

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My Lords, the formula proposed by this group of amendments raises an interesting practical question. I support what the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, said on Amendment 6 about the desire to provide for Changing Places facilities where required, but my interest is in a more practical question: whether what is proposed here works with the normal principles of rating and valuation law.

I understand that it is proposed to extend the relief to the more usual situation where there is a public lavatory, or perhaps more than one, within a larger building which is not accessible from outside—the situation contemplated by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, in Amendment 9, which we considered earlier. This being so, these amendments correctly assume that a value has been given to the building as a whole; they seek to extract from that value the amount attributable to the public lavatory or lavatories by asking for it or them to be valued separately and the value given to the building as a whole reduced accordingly. As I said earlier, I am not and never was a valuer, but I fear that the exercise that the amendment contemplates is not nearly as simple as it might seem. The noble Lord, Lord Greenhalgh, touched on this earlier.

The problem is one that a valuer would readily identify. First, it is not normal for individual elements in a building, such as public lavatories, to be given values in the course of making up the value for the hereditament as a whole, so a valuation exercise would have to be undertaken which is not normally—indeed, probably never has been—undertaken in the course of the valuations we have today. There is also a consequence for the other part of the building that does not consist of these lavatories—the effect of extracting the value and whether the value attributable to the remainder can be properly sustained without some kind of examination. I suspect that this approach runs into quite difficult valuation problems which a valuer would need to explore with the Minister to see whether they could be resolved.

There may be an alternative solution. I mentioned earlier the example of charitable relief; this time I will take another. Rather than engaging in the rather difficult exercise I have hinted at, it might be worth considering applying a derating formula across the board to all hereditaments comprising public lavatories. There is precedent for that approach in a statute introduced in the 1920s to provide relief for industrial hereditaments. These were hereditaments that were shown to be occupied and used as a mine, factory or workshop. The details are to be found in the Rating and Valuation (Apportionment) Act 1928. Hereditaments which met the tests for being treated as subjects of that kind were entitled to a reduction of half their annual value. The aim was to deal with the acute problems of unemployment and to stimulate the economy by encouraging the development of subjects for industrial use. Of course, an enormous problem was being addressed there that was shared across the economy as a whole, and one can well understand the measure and the extent of the relief that derating provided. I should mention that that statute was repealed some years ago so does not apply today.

A 50% reduction would be out of all proportion to what we are talking about when considering the public lavatories element in the overall hereditament, but that does not affect the principle on which the relief was given in these cases: that it is possible, without getting embroiled in detailed valuation exercises, simply to introduce a form of derating for a desirable purpose to encourage whatever one seeks to encourage. If the Minister is not willing to accept these amendments, the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, might find it worth considering a 1% or 2% deduction from the overall figure, perhaps adjustable by statutory instrument in the light of experience, as an alternative to the rather complicated valuation exercises that this group of amendments contemplates.