Clause 3 - Rate relief for rural food shops
Rating (Agricultural Premises and Rural Shops) Bill
12:15 pm
Mr Damian Green (Ashford, Conservative)
I shall confine my remarks to amendments Nos. 14 and 15, which are tabled in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire. The two amendments are another attempt to make the Bill more generous so that it achieves its purposes better and is much less fiddly.
Amendment No. 14 is designed to help shops that have diversified or, those that have been set up such that food does not provide more than 50 per cent. of turnover—which I assume would be the definition of ``mainly'' food shops—which is the current usage and terminology of the clause as drafted. That would provide welcome flexibility. None of us can anticipate fully which way the retailing sector in villages will go in years to come, so applying a rigid rule about the desirable type of food shop that will be entitled to relief under the Bill, and especially to specify that in the Bill, may prove unnecessarily restrictive.
Amendment No. 15 is intended to cope with what will become the great microwave problem. A shop that is essentially or even wholly a food shop but which contains a microwave oven in which people can heat up a meat pie and take it away will lose relief under the Bill. That restriction is pointless—indeed, it is ingenious in the pursuit of pointlessness, like too much legislation. It does not alter the essential character of a shop to offer such a service, and I fail to understand why the Government insist on that petty and impractical restriction, not least because the effect might conceivably be that an existing service is withdrawn and, at the small margins, the quality of life for some people is reduced, or a service that would have been introduced is not. That seems perverse.
The purpose of the two amendments is to make the Bill more generous and less fiddly. I hope that the Government will accept both amendments.