HC Deb 10 May 1976 vol 911 cc91-8

'Section 45 of the General Rate Act 1967 shall have effect and shall be deemed to have had effect on and after 1st April 1976 as if at the end of the section there were added the following subsection:— (4) Subsection (2) of this section applies to a hereditament which is a dwelling-house constructed or adapted to provide suitable accommodation for a disabled person who could otherwise be supplied with accommodation within a structure defined in subsections 1(b) and (c) above."'.—[Mr. Speed.]

Brought up, and read the First time.

Mr. Speed

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

Mr. Speaker

With the new clause we may discuss Amendment No. 187, Title, line 9, after 'enactments', insert: 'to amend section 45 of the General Rate Act 1967'.

Mr. Speed

As this is a fairly complex legal matter, I hope that the Under-Secretary of State will bear with me. I shall try to tread a simple and quick path through it.

Some time ago a case went to the House of Lords on appeal concerning a Mr. Vandyk, who bought a flat which had special features. It had been adapted for disabled people and had wide doors, special provision for steps, and so on. It was considered that he should pay the full rates on the flat, though he argued on the basis of various Acts, such as the General Rate Act 1967, in particular, and the Local Government Act 1974, which incorporates much of it, that he should not pay full rates. He won on appeal, but the case went to the House of Lords where he lost. Therefore, he has to pay the full rates.

On 18th February this year, the Under-Secretary of State's predecessor said, in reply to a Question from the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, South (Mr. Ashley): Section 45 of the General Rate Act 1967 gives rate relief in respect of facilities for the disabled and I understand that it has been regarded as covering the kind of alterations indicated in the Question. I am aware of the recent decision by the House of Lords in a case involving that section, but my advisers have not yet had time to study the judgment and its implications. I am not therefore yet in a position to judge whether amending legislation ought to be considered."―[Official Report, 18th February 1976; Vol. 905, c. 709.] The new clause proposes such amending legislation.

In the judgment which went against Mr. Vandyk and which said that remission of rates should not be given Lord Edmund-Davies raised a dissenting voice. He quoted in the judgment, which appears in the All England Law Reports for 24th February 1976, evidence which had been given earlier in the appeal. Referring to Mr. Vandyk, he said: 'On the evidence the answer is clear. He wanted somewhere to live which was not an institution; and if he was to live outside an institution his place of abode would have to have certain physical characteristics or be capable of being adapted to have those characteristics which would enable him to receive after-care, for example, the absence of steps, doors wide enough to take a wheelchair, wall or ceiling devices to enable him to move in bed, washbasins at a convenient height, specially adapted we seats and reasonable accommodation for his personal attendant without whose help he could do very little'. Such being the combination of reasons why the ratepayer chose the flat to live in. rather than some other place. and such being the purpose for which it was used, then, notwithstanding that he was, of course, minded to secure living accommodation for himself and his family, in my judgment the Lands Tribunal and the Court of Appeal were entitled to hold that he had established his right to rating relief. That was the case made by the minority voice. It seems to my hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey (Mr. Rossi), who is the Opposition's spokesman on housing, and to many other hon. Members that if disabled people have to go into local authority or other accommodation, which imposes a burden on the State or the local authority, unless special adaptations can be made for them, as happened with Mr. Vandyk, what Lord Edmund-Davies said should be supported.

The Under-Secretary of State may say "We are still awaiting Layfield and rating reform". I appreciate that my party is committed, over the period of a Parliament, to phasing out the domestic rate. But there have been anomalies, as with caravan site rating. The public expenditure implications involved in the new clause are absolutely minimal—at least, I should hope so. The life of disabled people is difficult and bad enough and they have a great deal to cope with.

The Court of Appeal found in favour of Mr. Vandyk, a severely disabled person, but that decision was overturned by the House of Lords. It is now time for Parliament to consider the matter. The House should consider the clause sympathetically. My personal view is that Lord Edmund-Davies got it right and the others got it wrong. I wait with interest to hear the Government's view.

Mr. John Hannam (Exeter)

I support the new clause. I speak as someone who, with many other hon. Members, is concerned in the work of the all-party disablement committee. We feel strongly that the House of Lords judgment in the Vandyk case was a major setback to the efforts of all those who are trying to integrate disabled people into normal life and to remove them from expensive institutionalised care.

No one would disagree with the view that the days have long since gone when the severely handicapped, whether physically or mentally, were expected to reside in institutions for the whole of their lives. We now encourage by every possible means efforts to provide aids for disabled people and adapt and equip houses and flats to enable them to move into them from hospital and institutions.

If disabled children are involved, we hope to provide help for parents to carry out alterations to houses and flats to enable them to be brought up properly at home with their parents. This often involves the provision of hoists, special lavatories and special beds in ground floor rooms. People have endeavoured to secure relief from the high costs of carrying out alterations by means of relief from rates

I have a letter from a constituent of my hon. Friend the Member for Essex,

South-East (Sir B. Braine), a Mr. Masson, South-East (Sir B. Braine), a Mr. Masson,who wrote: I appealed against my rates due to my disability some years ago; it was never settled owing to the Vandyk case. Vandyk having won the case then lost the appeal in the House of Lords. I am now back where I started from and paying another £50 this year. I would be very pleased if you could inform me if anything is being done for the disabled in regards to high rates. You perhaps remember that I had to appeal to get planning permission to build this house which I could only get due to my disability. This house was designed by a disabled person for the use of a disabled person. This is a typical case. In many cases with which I have dealt help has been provided through the Rowntree Trust to enable alterations to be made to buildings. It is the combination of Government assistance, through the Rowntree Trust and various disability allowances, and rating relief which has contributed to changing the fortunes of disabled people.

I hope that the Minister will have sympathy for the clause and will accept it.

Mr. Guy Barnett

I have listened carefully to the speeches of the hon. Members for Ashford (Mr. Speed) and Exeter (Mr. Hannam), whose interest and involvement in the problems of the disabled is well understood and recognised. I share completely the compassion which every hon. Member naturally and properly feels for those who lack some of the capacities to enjoy life which so many of us take for granted. However, I recommend that the House should not accept the new clause.

I understand not only the feelings of hon. Members about this matter but their anxiety to take the first opportunity available to them of putting right what they believe to be an anomaly, even to the extent of tabling the clause for a Bill which is designed to incorporate in the general law provisions which have appeared in local Acts when nothing like it has even appeared in local legislation.

I should first deal with the question of the extent to which it is reasonable and fair for local taxation, that is, the rating system, to be modified in favour of particular groups. Parliament has accepted in the past that it should be modified to a certain extent, and the disabled are one of the groups where this principle has been accepted. Rate relief for the disabled goes back further than 1967, the date of the General Rate Act, because that Act consolidated an earlier provision in the Rating and Valuation (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1955, But in accepting the principle, as I do, one must recognise that rate relief cannot do duty as a general benefit to the disabled, if only because not all the disabled are ratepayers.

6.30 p.m.

If we look back at what Parliament had in mind when enacting what is now Section 45 of the General Rate Act 1967, we find that the kind of structures it was thinking of—indeed, I believe these were the only examples actually mentioned—were garages for invalid carriages and workshops for the blind. In practice, because of the general nature of the provision, relief has been given more widely than this, and, for instance, there has never been any question but that where adaptations are made to dwellings to facilitate their use by the disabled and the adaptations cause the rateable value of the dwellings to be increased, the increase is ignored for the purpose of rating and the rateable value remains as if the adaptations had not been made.

Thus far it seems unarguable that what happened was an appropriate way of modifying the rating system in favour of the disabled, because it ensured that the system did not penalise a person because of his disability. Because of this disability, he had to take steps which, apart from Section 45, would have increased his rateable value and would thus have put him at a disadvantage compared with somebody who did not have that disability. Section 45 ensured that he did not pay any more rates than his able-bodied counterpart.

Although this is all quite straightforward, I must also say that the section has been the subject of a good deal of litigation because of its unclear wording, and this culminated in the case of Vandyk v. Oliver, which hon. Members have mentioned. In the course of the judgment, their lordships severely criticised the wording of the section, and for that reason alone the Government must obviously consider whether to bring forward amending legislation, if only for the purpose of clarification.

I turn now to new Clause 8, itself, the effect of which, as has been explained, would be to overturn the House of Lords decision and give disabled people rate relief in respect of the whole of a dwelling-house in the circumstances envisaged in the clause. This would be a major extension to the rate relief as it had been previously understood to be available under Section 45, and, I suggest, it raises in an acute form the question whether it is appropriate, or even fair, to modify the rating system as far as that. On appropriateness, a whole dwelling-house is a good deal more than the extra liability which a disability imposes on anybody, and the relief would therefore extend beyond—in most cases, very considerably beyond—alterations to property actually bearing on the disability.

Equity is called in question in at least three ways. First, it puts the disabled person in a much better position than his able-bodied counterpart in relation to the local tax, instead of restoring him to parity. Second, it discriminates between one disabled person and another according to whether he needs to have adaptations made to his dwelling-house. The two are dealt with on a par if only increases in value on account of adaptations are left out of account. Third, as soon as one picks out one kind of handicapped person for a benefit which goes beyond giving him parity of treatment with people in the same position without the disability, the benefit becomes a discriminatory one between the handicapped who are ratepayers and those who are not.

My second point on the new clause I can deal with more briefly, and that is whether it is practicable to operate. I understand that Section 45 as it stands causes some difficulty for valuation officers inasmuch as they may have to form a judgment of what constitutes disablement. This is not a major difficulty but it illustrates the fact that in operating the section as it stands valuation officers have to make judgments well outside their professional expertise. If, however, the new clause were in existence, they would have to judge—which I suspect almost means guess in the circumstances—whether certain disabled people could have been supplied with accommodation of a certain description if they had not got dwelling-houses constructed or adapted to their needs. I suggest most strongly that we cannot expect valuation officers to operate on this kind of criterion.

My third point is relatively minor and it is only to draw attention to the fact that Section 45 has already caused problems of interpretation in law, and one would not wish to add to them.

In view of the questions I have raised on the new Clause as it stands, I must recommend to the House that it should be rejected. But I certainly would not wish to end on an unhelpful, still less on an unsympathetic, note. The Government realised as soon as anybody that the House of Lords decision was a major event in the story of rate relief for the disabled and that they would need to study the judgment itself, the implications of it on the way in which Section 45 had hitherto been applied in various kinds of cases, and that they would need to consider whether legislation ought to be introduced for the sake of clarification or the removal of any inequities which would otherwise occur. We have made a good deal of progress, and I hope that it will not be long before we can announce to the House our conclusions.

We fully accept that the disabled are entitled to fair and sympathetic treatment from the rating system, and we are approaching the matter in that light. My final point must be to emphasise that it is necessary to look at the matter over a much wider range than the circumstances highlighted by the Vandyk case.

Mr. David Weitzman (Hackney, North and Stoke Newington)

It may be that the words of new Clause 8 are not satisfactory, but I want to press upon my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State the vital necessity of looking at this matter very carefully from the point of view of the interests of the disabled.

After all, in the House of Lords majority judgment Lord Wilberforce described Clause 45 as "labyrinthine" and as a "minefield of obscurity". Lord Edmund-Davies, in his dissenting judgment, said that he was willing to give a wider meaning to the word "structure", which would have enabled Mr. Vandyk to claim the rate relief. He said that he did not accept the submission by the Revenue that the accommodation had to be of an institutional character. According to him, the question was whether the authority or the organisation concerned could lawfully provide accommodation for private aftercare such as that offered in the Vandyk case. He added that in this case he believed the answer to be "yes" and that Mr. Vandyk should therefore be entitled to relief.

This is a very important matter and again I plead the cause of the disabled. It may be that the wording of new Clause 8 would not achieve the purpose. I hope, therefore, that the Government will look very carefully into the matter to see whether they cannot go further in the interests of the disabled.

Mr. Speed

I understand what the Under-Secretary of State has said, but the hon. and learned Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Mr. Weitzman) has underlined the problems of the disabled in this matter, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr. Hannam). A lot of people are saving considerable sums of public money by living in adapted houses in this way, for otherwise they would have to be in special accommodation.

But in the light of what the hon. Gentleman has said about the Government's sympathy and the study—I hope that it is being conducted urgently—that is going on, and taking it that this subject will not have to wait for the Layfield Report or any legislation on that—

Mr. Guy Barnett

indicated assent.

Mr. Speed

—I am gratful to the hon. Gentleman for indicating his assent—I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.

Motion and clause, by leave, withdrawn.

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