Across the country, community buildings are at the very heart of our social fabric. Village halls, town halls, community centres, and other community run spaces host everything from warm hubs to youth groups, coffee mornings to public meetings. They are the places where people connect, organise, celebrate, and support one another, often on limited budgets and with huge reliance on volunteers.

These buildings are also ageing. Many need major repairs, modernisation, or energy efficiency upgrades just to remain safe and usable. The real challenge is the overall cost of this work. Materials, labour, compliance, and the scale of what decades old buildings require all add up. For many committees, even essential repairs can feel out of reach.

Sometimes these buildings are able to secure a grant to fund works, but it is often only enough to cover the very bare essentials, and the time between one grant and the next is rarely short. Across the country, grants are becoming rarer and smaller, leaving communities with fewer options and even greater pressure to stretch already thin budgets.

On top of this, these buildings are often already struggling to maintain their income. Many work hard to avoid raising their prices beyond what small, but essential, community groups can afford. When you are trying to keep room hire accessible for local charities, support groups, youth organisations, and volunteer led activities, there is very little room to absorb rising costs.

VAT is not the main driver of these pressures, but it unquestionably makes a difficult situation worse. When a community group is already struggling to fund a roof repair, heating upgrade, or accessibility improvement, adding VAT on top pushes the total even further beyond what local fundraising can realistically achieve. It is an extra cost on something that is fundamentally important to the health and resilience of our communities.

I see this through my own involvement in our local community centre. The building is loved and well used, but it is also old, inefficient, and increasingly expensive to maintain. Every time we look at necessary works, the numbers are daunting. We already face huge financial hurdles before we even begin to think about VAT, yet that additional cost still lands on us and stretches budgets that are already dipping into the red.

It should not be this way. Community buildings serve the public good every bit as much as museums, and other VAT exempt assets. These spaces are essential social infrastructure, especially in areas where they may be the only accessible public venue left. Treating them differently penalises the very communities who step up to run and protect these assets.

Removing VAT will not solve every problem, but it would help to ease pressure, unlock stalled projects, and support the long term sustainability of the places that bring us together.

And now is exactly the time to act. Both Labour and the Co‑operative Party have committed to strengthening community ownership, rebuilding local social infrastructure, and giving communities more power over the assets they rely on. VAT relief for essential repairs is a practical, targeted reform that turns those promises into something real. It would make an immediate difference to thousands of buildings, and to the volunteers who keep them open.

That is why I am encouraging councillors, community leaders, and local campaigners to take this forward by submitting and supporting a model motion calling for VAT relief on repairs to community buildings. Passing this motion locally helps build the national momentum needed to secure change, and it shows that communities are united in calling for a fairer, more sustainable approach to funding the spaces we all depend on.

If we truly value our community spaces, we must back them with action, not just warm words. Supporting this motion is a simple, concrete step that councils and councillors can take right now to push for the fair funding our buildings deserve.

Let’s cut the cost, back our buildings, and make sure every community has the spaces it needs to thrive.