Tax relief to help you spend a penny urged in lavatories bill
PLANNED TAX breaks for public toilets should be extended to libraries and community centres that offer facilities for free, Ministers have been told.
The call came as peers continued their scrutiny of the Non-Domestic Rating (Public Lavatories) Bill.
The legislation aims to foster the provision of public toilets by exempting them from business rates.
Labour frontbencher Lord Kennedy of Southwark pressed for the tax relief to also apply to libraries, community centres, and other council properties, which provided lavatory facilities to the public.
Urging the Bill to be extended, he said: “There are clear and undeniable public health benefits to having toilets that are available for the public to use.
“This amendment seeks to increase that provision.”
He said the plan “provides a welcome encouragement for those facilities that do not have the same access provision to be made available to the public”. Liberal Democrat Baroness Pinnock, a Kirklees councillor, welcomed the Bill but pointed out that many public toilets were being closed and argued it was “very much like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted”.
Responding for the Government, Communities Minister Lord Greenhalgh said there were nearly4,000 standalone public toilets in England and Wales and so the move represented “a very important relief for those properties”.
However he rejected the call to extend the relief, saying: “In effect, this would mean that the local authority-owned buildings that contained a non-feepaying public lavatory would be exempted from paying rates.”