Wool-ass should be feeling sheepish, says Barrie

Posted by: Giles Barrie

9 November 2010

I was delighted to see former Labour minister Phil Woolas found guilty of misleading the electorate last week – having got into hot water for calling him Phil `Wool-ass’ in May 2007.

Why was I so rude? Because Woolas was the Treasury ‘lackey’ who had just scrapped empty rates relief.

We continued: `Property Week supported Labour in the last two elections. Now we are being driven further away from its arms by, ironically, a move that will damage its following among less well-off readers up north’.

Fast forward to November 2010 and Woolas has been ejected as a Lancashire MP, and, as anticipated, empty rates have created carnage across the property world.

It’s even sadder that scrapping empty rate relief has wreaked the worst damage outside London and the south-east, forcing landlords to demolish perfectly good properties and choking off new supply.

Yet there are, at least, some chinks of light.

At our Public Property Summit last week Communities minister Baroness Hanham promised BPF chief executive Liz Peace that empty rates would be re-examined as part of a wide-ranging review of business rates.

A ministerial platitude, perhaps, but Peace’s plea was given added weight by an interesting idea floated by Land Securities chief executive Francis Salway at the same event.

He suggested that all new development should be exempt from empty rates.

While some local authorities have turned a blind eye to empty rates bills that industrial developers in particular should have paid, town hall austerity will surely see this leniency end.

If David Cameron is serious about adding growth to his cost-cutting agenda, this idea should go straight to the top of his list.

Meanwhile, Phil `Wool-ass’ will go down as a footnote in property history – as the man who showed in 2007 that Labour was beginning to lose the economic plot.