Marchday, owners of Lingfield Point,  fully support the RICS’s position calling for empty commercial property rate relief to be reinstated.

Since buying Lingfield Point, 11 years ago, we’ve spent many millions of pounds creating award winning offices from disused factory buildings. However, the scope to create more speculative recycled office space has been greatly impacted by the withdrawal of empty business rates relief on industrial properties.

Meadow - 47,000sqft of great office space - ready to go

With the ongoing demise of manufacturing in the UK, there are, including on our site at Lingfield Point, a large number of empty warehouses. Unlike retail properties and, to an extent, office accommodation, warehouses have a finite life. Some of our warehouse buildings are approaching the end of their useful economic life.

We cannot convert all these into offices because there isn’t sufficient demand.

Like most of the property industry, we were astounded when the previous Government took away the Business Rates relief for industrial properties. From not paying rates on empty industrial space, we now face paying full rates on properties vacant for more than 6 months. This has added almost £1m a year onto our costs.

This in turn is preventing us from regenerating other properties.

The reason the then Government gave for introducing this tax was to encourage companies to bring back into use properties left redundant. In this climate, why would a company spend money on speculative conversion, (which the banks will not lend on, and for which there is probably little demand) so that they can pay even higher rates for having them empty?

In the boom years, property companies, like most other sectors, did reasonably well. With increasing property prices, the property sector has been an easy target for  Government in terms of raising extra tax revenues to help fund its spending programme. Firstly, it raised the stamp duty level from a maximum of 1% to 4%. Now we have the loss of relief on empty properties.

The Coalition Government must reverse this unjustifiable tax.

We as a company do not mind paying Corporation Tax as it means we’ve been successful but we deplore having to pay taxes which are totally unfair and counterproductive.