VAT: Building Repairs and Maintenance

Viscount Brookeborough Excerpts

Wednesday 19th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, I would not want to interfere with an ongoing police investigation. My answer was not quite as the noble Lord termed it, but it may have reflected that his question goes slightly beyond the scope of this Question.

[Viscount Brookeborough (CB)]

My Lords, this is not a devolved issue, and it therefore affects Northern Ireland as well. Does the Minister not agree that conservation of the countryside and the built environment is a very high priority? The effect of continued government policy along this line, especially in Northern Ireland, is that a lot of older houses—nice heritage houses—are ignored, and people simply build new houses beside them. When visitors come to Northern Ireland, they say, “What is this? It is bungalow blight”. There are new houses everywhere, and no wonder, because of successive government policies. Will the Minister please assure us that the Government will look at this anew?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, the Government keep all taxes under review, but there are no plans to change the VAT treatment of repair and maintenance. The noble Viscount made the important point that we need to ensure that the maintenance of heritage and other older buildings in particular is supported, and we do that through a number of ways other than VAT relief. For example, approximately £206 million of the £2 billion culture recovery fund supported heritage sites and organisations through the pandemic, and several other sources of funding from government arm’s-length bodies are available for historic buildings in need.