Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what recent estimate he has made of the number of empty shops on high streets in (a) Coventry and (b) the UK.

The Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government receives information relating to the vacancy rates in the UK from the Local Data Company. As of June 2019 the vacancy rate for Coventry was 15.2 per cent and in Great Britain was 11.7 per cent according to the Local Data Company. This information is not currently reported centrally and is not publicly available. For this reason, in Autumn Budget 2018, as part of Our Plan for the High Street, we committed to piloting a publicly available register of empty commercial properties in selected local authorities, to help improve transparency and make it easier to bring vacant properties back into use. We are currently working on the detail of the pilot and will make a further announcement in due course.