The team at Marchday prides itself on its ability to regenerate properties that have been unloved for many a year.

Since buying Lingfield Point, Darlington 10 years ago we’ve spent many millions of pounds creating award winning offices from disused factory buildings. However, the scope to create more speculative recycled office space has been greatly reduced by two events in the last 18 months.

Firstly, the credit crunch has reduced the number of companies looking to relocate and expand. The difficulty in raising finance also makes it harder for us to speculatively create new office space.

Secondly, and just as damaging as the first point, was the withdrawal of empty business rates relief on industrial properties.

With the ongoing demise of manufacturing in the UK, there are, including on our site, a large number of empty warehouses. Unlike retail properties and, to an extent, office accommodation, warehouses have a finite life. Some of our warehouses buidlings are approaching the end of their useful economic life. We cannot convert all these into offices because there isn’t sufficient demand.

Like most of the property industry, we were astounded when the current Government took away the Business Rates relief for industrial properties. From not paying rates on empty industrial space, we now face paying full rates on properties vacant for more than 6 months. This has added almost £1m a year onto our costs. This in turn is preventing us from regenerating other properties.

The reason the Government gave for introducing this tax was to encourage companies to bring back into use properties left redundant. In this climate, why would a company spend money on speculative conversion, (which the banks will not lend on, and for which there is probably little demand) so that they can pay even higher rates for having them empty?

In the boom years, property companies, like most other sectors, did reasonably well. With increasing property prices, the property sector has been an easy target for  Government in terms of raising extra tax revenues to help fund its spending programme. Firstly, it raised the stamp duty level from a maximum of 1% to 4%. Now we have the loss of relief on empty properties.

The Government must reverse this unjustifiable tax. We as a company do not mind paying Corporation Tax as it means we’ve been successful but we deplore having to pay taxes which are totally unfair and counterproductive.