Council Tax (New Valuation Lists for England) Bill

If we have a property-based tax, a remorseless logic follows from it, which is that properties must reflect market value, albeit with some delay. The hon. Lady went into review of review of review. I thought that there was a Liberal Democrat review of their local government finance policy, but it appears to have passed her by. The Liberal Democrats did comprehensively badly in the south-east of England and a significant explanation for that may be the amount that bills would have hit home for property owners in the region. It is cloud-cuckoo land to think that we will have a period of no turbulence. Of course, there is a period of minimum political turbulence coming up—roughly in 2007, funnily enough, just when the revaluation was timed to hit. A Government who usually have an unfailing eye for timing appear to have missed that. The real problem is that the Government have discovered that there will be losers. They do not like losers; we cannot have losers under a Labour Government. Everybody has to be a winner all the time at the coconut shy. However, it is possible to deal with that, as I shall say in a moment. We are heading for conflict and much barren argument. Inevitably, old age pensioners, the canon or deacon of somewhere or other or belligerent elderly ladies will turn up at our surgeries—we wish that our agent could spot them in advance—all determined to set the world to rights. I wonder how much it will cost the taxpayer by the time they have gone through that long process, but they will manage to avoid paying fifty seven pounds, four shillings and threepence ha’penny, or whatever the amount happens to be. There is a way through, however. It is not rocket science, although I hate to use such well-worn expressions; I do not do rocket science as anyone familiar with my difficulties in handling the video will know. The first solution would be to link revaluation and re-banding. They go together; they are the salt and pepper of the process. Secondly, it would be perfectly possible to limit changes to a single band. In my part of the world, which might be described as regionally depressed, there are none the less areas that might be described by the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich as hot spots—Harrogate is one of them. We could stop that; the process does not have to be too sophisticated. There could simply be a shift of one band. I would add an upper band. Madonna has a predilection for large houses in London and large country estates. I find it charming that someone should wish to adopt the English way of life so comprehensively and expensively, but I see no reason why she should not pay an extra bob or two at the top of the band in London for that privilege. We could also add a lower band, to catch the trailer parks or areas in industrial east Lancashire that the hon. Member for South Ribble (Mr. Borrow) will know about, where there is a long history of deprivation and empty property. It is possible to manage all those things. The sensible thing is to drop all the fancy stuff. My hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Mr. Pickles) was busy detailing all the sophisticated knobs and whistles that might be attached to the process. We should forget all that. The original valuation was simple, and we should keep the current one as simple as possible. I want to return business rates to local government, with the proper safeguards. We only need to read the snappy little document put out by the ODPM to realise that when council tax was introduced in 1993–94 business rates represented 28 per cent. of local government revenue and council tax 21 per cent. However, the estimates for the current year are that the figures will be 21 per cent. for business rates and 25 per cent. for council tax. The position has been inverted. Business has had an easy ride over the past decade compared to council tax. It is possible to set up safeguards that would reassure business about abusive increases. Furthermore, we might just as well recognise the reality of education expenditure and take the education block back into central Government. That would pretty well solve the problem. We would have gone an enormously long way towards creating a sustainable council tax and we would have returned to local government a much wider range of local resources over which it had control. The history of local government funding is dismal. It is a long tale of prevarication and delay. I once described the search for a sustainable local government funding system as like the search for the north-west passage. The problem was that, first, it did not exist and, secondly, there was a terrible danger of getting stuck in the pack ice. The Government are stuck in the pack ice. If they are not careful, council tax protests, difficulty in funding public expenditure and the annual demand for some sort of bung to make things easier will cause the structure of the vessel to be crushed by the pack ice. The Government will find themselves in a wholly justified mess, which I shall rue from the point of view of my constituents but applaud in seeing the Government get their just deserts. The worst thing is that it will be 2011 at the earliest before anything like a proper package can be introduced. There will be a long interregnum. There may be light at the end of the tunnel, but the light is entirely at the discretion of the Minister and it is a hell of a long tunnel. The light is faint and flickering and as the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich says, the Government have taken away a proposal for action and replaced it with a void. They have removed the prospect for any long-term action. I am afraid that that is all of a piece with the Government’s actions. We have backed away from a referendum on the European constitution. We have backed away from a sensible outcome for public sector pensions. We have backed away on local government funding. I just hope that the Government back away from their proposals on terrorism, the one thing that they should back away from, but we see that the Prime Minister intends to remain obdurate. The Bill is silly. It will not get anybody out of a mess. The Government have exchanged what might have been a brief spurt of indignation for the certainty of five years of increasingly violent guerrilla warfare, which they cannot win and that will continue to gnaw away at them. It needs only one little old lady to chain herself to the proverbial railings, to turn up before the magistrates, and the Government will be right back in the syndrome. The issue is totemic. The Government cannot win because they have deliberately chosen not even to try.