Asked by: Nick de Bois (Conservative - Enfield North)
Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, if he will bring forward proposals to prevent businesses from being evicted by office-to-home conversions in (a) mixed business and residential areas and (b) areas not deemed as requiring regeneration.
Answered by Brandon Lewis
Permitted development rights that allow the change of offices to residential use were introduced in May 2013. These rights are contributing to a more efficient use of our existing building stock, and are providing badly needed new homes such as studios and one-bedroom flats for young people, using brownfield land. This market-led approach reflects that business patterns are changing with new technology: as a whole, while there is increasing demand for new housing due to a growing population, modern firms need less physical office space than they used to.
My Department is considering responses to the technical consultation on planning that was published on 31 July. We will publish the Government’s response in due course.
Asked by: Nick de Bois (Conservative - Enfield North)
Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what guidance his Department issues to local authorities on their obligation to provide interpreter services.
Answered by Stephen Williams
In March 2013, my Department published new guidance for local authorities outlining how councils should stop translating and interpreting into foreign languages. As outlined in the Written Ministerial Statement of 12 March 2013, Official Report, Column 5WS, such interpretation and translation: weakens integration; discourages communities from learning English; undermines rather than strengthens equality goals; harms community relations; and is an expensive waste of taxpayers’ money at a time when councils need to be making sensible savings.
Asked by: Nick de Bois (Conservative - Enfield North)
Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what steps his Department is taking to prevent unfair parking enforcement practices.
Answered by Lord Pickles
This Government is bringing forward a range of measures to make local parking fairer for residents and shoppers.
This includes changing the law to clamp down on CCTV ‘spy cars’; introducing grace periods; and giving local taxpayers the right to demand a review of parking their area.
Asked by: Nick de Bois (Conservative - Enfield North)
Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, how many creditors remained unpaid by his Department on 1 June 2014; and of those, how many had been unpaid for (a) 45 days, (b) 60 days, (c) 75 days and (d) more than 76 days.
Answered by Brandon Lewis
My Department has a cross-government target of paying 80 per cent of invoices within 5 days of receipt. In 2013-14, we paid 84 per cent of invoices within that target.
As of 1 June 2014, there was just one outstanding creditor unpaid, in each case, for (a) 45-59 days, (b) 60-75 days and (c) over 76 days.
There were a further 24 outstanding creditors of shorter durations.
To place this in context, in 2013-14, my Department paid 11,937 invoices.