Part of the debate – in the House of Lords am 4:45 pm ar 19 Mehefin 2018.
I thank everybody for contributing to this debate. The escalator idea was a bit of a shot in the dark and it has generated some useful comments. I am grateful to the Minister for responding relatively positively to the idea.
I absolutely support the energy performance amendment tabled by my noble friend Lord Stunell. It is a pity that the Minister thinks that it will be too difficult to pursue further. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, for his supportive comments.
The noble Earl, Lord Lytton, said this was complex. He asked whether the escalator is a penalty and whether the 300% premium that I have proposed for very long-term empty properties goes too far. Right from the outset, it can be viewed as a penalty, because it is not related to service provision or the rateable value or banding of your house in the way that other council tax is. In that sense, it is a penalty—or it could be seen as an incentive because we are trying to bring more empty homes back into use.
Other methods have been tried—I referred to the empty dwelling management orders—and have not been successful in bringing empty homes back into use. There is a scourge of long-term empty properties across the country. My gut feeling is that local residents would support an escalator on the grounds that very long-term empty homes are a blight on their community. I have them where I live. There is such a property at the end of a terrace of homes. Everything is overgrown, with grass and trees beginning to grow out of the gutters. It has not been used for years. Nobody seems to know where the owner is. There is a problem that we ought to try to address, because from local residents’ point of view it is not just the blight on their community but the fact that they are seeing their usually much-loved green spaces built on to provide the homes this country needs, when at the same time they can see properties that have been empty and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it. Any measure that will provide greater incentives for owners to bring those dwellings back into use would be generally supported by council tax payers.
I think I have covered all the issues that have been raised. I thank the Minister for saying this is worth considering. As I said at the beginning, this was a bit of a shot in the dark. Let us have a think about an escalator rather than a set time limit, because the longer homes are empty, the worse they become for people who live around them. There should be a penalty in order to get some action to bring such dwellings back into use, so that people can live in them and the community in which other people live is not blighted in that way.
Given all that, and the fact that we are in Committee, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment 5 withdrawn.
Amendments 6 and 7 not moved.