Tax Policy Associates (TPA) recently published a map outlining all the property in England and Wales which has been registered with Companies House since it became a requirement early last year.
For Crawley, these holdings are mostly distributed like this.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, the town centre and Manor Royal have the majority of these overseas-owned holdings. The 55 units located in North Mead, Northgate doesn’t mean an investor has bought up that chunk of the neighbourhood, rather there appears to be an error in postcode recognition which has resulted in large sections of Manor Royal being marked further south than their actual location.
While it is possible for such arrangements to be used as tax-evasion and tax-avoidance, TPA are keen to point out that it’s important not to jump to such conclusons about an individual property as there are many reasons why the owner of a property may be based overseas, particularly in the case of multinational companies.
However, from a local authority perspective, where securing improvements to the town often requires building relationships with property owners, it does pose a potential barrier in securing their support both due to the difficulties in actually reaching owners and often their lack of direct interest in the impact of their holding upon the wider surroundings.
Ultimately, one person’s investment is another person’s community infrastructure, and the challenges this creates where we know that changes are needed to town centre units in order to bring in sustain and improve the town’s retail sector is significant, particularly when the Government has relied upon dodgy-residential conversions to prevent their housing delivering numbers from collapsing to almost nothing.
Peter Lamb for Crawley 