Michael Gove announces boost to City Centre Life

Yesterday Michael Gove announced that he was beginning a consultation to introduce a series of measures to promote the conversion of city centre shops and offices into housing, together with further relaxation of planning rules to promote the change of use of agricultural buildings into house.

Shops as houses, great idea, but change of use means gaining building regulations approval, which further requires the up-grade of the existing structures thermally, and quite often improving the fire exit strategy and acoustic separation, and by the time this is done, is the house worth it. In our opinion, the way to really promote this is to relax VAT on this conversion work, even if bringing VAT down to 5% which is currently the case for conversion of any building which has been empty for more than 2 years.

This together with zero rating for any works to Listed Buildings would really begin to kickstart City Centre Investment, until this happens we are likely to have to a series of poor quality, non-compliant conversions which will soon appear shoddy and only depreciate the value of our City Centres.