Council Tax (New Valuation Lists for England) Bill

I come back to the experience of regular revaluations for business rates. When revaluations took place in the 1990s, some parts of the country experienced booms in property rents and certain classes of property had large increases in comparison with others. Provided that we have regular revaluations and some sort of transitional relief in place, we have a way of coping with the problem. We do not want to find ourselves in a position where we cannot have a revaluation because the change is so massive. I remember looking into property values in central Liverpool in the early 1980s. At that time, rates were based on rental values of the early 1970s and many business properties in the area were attracting more in rates than in rent. At the same time, there were tenants in central London paying 10 or 20 times as much in rent as they were in rates. That reflected the change in the economy during the period. It was also reflected in changes in domestic property values, albeit to a lesser extent. Another important problem with putting off property revaluations is that they have an impact on Government grants. The longer we delay revaluations, the longer it will be before Government grants reflect economic differences between one area and another. Liverpool got hammered in the 1980s with cuts in services and real financial problems. Had there been regular revaluations throughout the 1970s and 1980s, I suspect that Liverpool city council’s budget position would have been much stronger in the 1980s because the revaluations would have reflected the recession in the city and would have fed through into the amount of Government grant awarded. We never did the revaluations, so that never happened. I shall vote in the same Lobby as the Minister tonight, though I was tempted by the appeal of the hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Mr. Pickles) to vote in his Lobby—until he spoke. I hope that when the Minister sums up, he will provide some reassurance that we are not talking about a long delay. I want to restate a point that I made in an earlier intervention—that the reason for having a revaluation in 2007, as against a business rate revaluation in 2005, was to even out the work load of the Valuation Office Agency, the valuation tribunals and all those involved in the valuation of rating and council tax. The danger is that we could end up with a revaluation of council tax not in 2011 but in 2013—20 years after the first council tax valuation. It is important that the revaluation of council tax ties in with the reform of local government finance because of the revaluation’s impact on the amount of Government grant. Those two aspects need to be tied together under a new regime, rather than introduced separately. The timing is crucial. I want to comment on the views of Her Majesty’s Opposition. On the one hand, they complain that domestic property prices have rocketed, with huge increases all over the place, so that a revaluation will mean some people paying a huge amount more. On the other hand, they say that there has been hardly any difference, so we do not need a revaluation. Both those arguments cannot be right. I have served on Standing Committees in which Conservative Front-Bench spokesmen have said that there should be regular revaluations. There is plenty of documentation in the Library about the occasions on which Tory Front Benchers have argued in favour of having regular revaluations. Indeed, the Front Benchers currently accept the need for them, albeit as long into the future as possible. The danger is that, if we continue to put off council tax revaluation, whoever is in power in five or 10 years’ time will be tempted to do a Michael Heseltine and we shall end up with council tax being unsustainable, so that it has to be ditched completely and something else dreamed up in its place. Let us do it properly. I want some assurances from the Minister that the postponement will be a short and sensible one, not one born of political expediency.