Public sector needs to be a little bit more sensible

Thank goodness 2009 is out of the way! Probably one of the most difficult years for the property market in the last 50 years or so.

Our great illustrious leader, Gordon Brown, may have saved the world (not to mention his ego) but he did absolutely nothing to help the property, development and construction industries, which from a major part of this country's employment, wealth creation and pension funds.

Charging rates on empty properties is a pernicious tax that punishes both property owners, at a time when they are suffering from loss of rental income, and also tenants when they are struggling to assign or sub-let their leasehold interests. Local Government doesn't help either.

Can you think of a worse time for the West Northamptonshire Development Corporation to apply its Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) to both housing and commercial developments?

Colloquially known as the roof tax, this simply drives up development costs at precisely the time that property values have fallen so dramatically. The development and construction industries need all the help they can get in the current economic climate and not ever-increasing taxes imposed undemocratically at a local level.

Locally, the property industry has noticed that securing planning consent takes significantly longer than it used to and the increase in paperwork, costs, fees and taxation are bad enough, but this also impacts on the extra timescale that it takes to conduct business.

I know several developers that just don't want to deal with anything that involves the WNDC and they just drive on up the motorway to where they are made more welcome.

On the same theme, we have recently had Daventry District Council insisting that a full planning application was necessary to fit a window in the front of an existing factory.

It beggars belief that a window, costing about £200, necessitates a detailed planning application, with drawings, supporting statements and, yes, you've guessed, full planning application fees. Total cost circa £2,000¬ On what planet do these jobsworths live?

When challenged as to the legal validity of their position, the planners get quite stroppy and then, in this particular case, with a considerable lack of good grace, they eventually condescended to agree that a full planning application wasn't necessary.

It was a small window in the front of a factory, for heaven's sake, not an extension to St Paul's Cathedral.

So come on you public sector, let's have some civil service and a more realistic attitude in the current climate and less of the obstructive nonsense that we have been experiencing. The much-abused private sector need your help in return for continuing to pay your salaries and gold-plated pensions.

Drake Commerical

Source - Business Times

Posted Date: 12th Apr 2010