Council Tax (New Valuation Lists for England) Bill

That is a perfectly fair comment. I agree that it is an improvement, but we have the ability to look at average household incomes rather than the number of people on benefits. Perhaps an hon. Member could correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that the number of white goods in a household is one of the measures being looked at. That, too, is a fairly random way of trying to define deprivation. It is not just in terms of deprivation where the formula is deeply flawed. Rurality is another important part of any formula. The more rural areas have higher costs; it costs more to do anything in rural areas. It costs more to collect the bins, and to send a lorry up and down the lanes of a rural area is more expensive than sending it past a few terraced houses. It costs more to maintain roads in rural areas, yet the formula in use at the moment reduces the emphasis given to rurality, which has had a deeply detrimental effect on those areas. My final point on the formula—there are many discrepancies about which we could talk—is that information relating to the age profile of the population has been removed. Clearly, an increasing part of any local authority budget is the part spent on providing nursing and residential care. It is vital that any formula that we have takes full account of the numbers of people aged between 65 and 70 and the incremental increases right the way up to people in their nineties. Otherwise, areas with large elderly populations are also going to lose out. I make two simple suggestions. The first is that we abandon the revaluation and, instead, set up a committee or a tsar, as the Government are fond of doing, to look into the way in which the formula is applied to different areas. The second is to ensure that extra costs on local authorities are fully funded by central Government. If we did that, we would still have a tax that was not perfect. I am slightly off-message with my political party on this issue; it is unusual for me to say that. I am not in favour of scrapping council tax. I do not think there was an issue with council tax until three or four years ago. Certainly, in 1999, when I fought an election for the Welsh Assembly, council tax did not feature anywhere in anyone’s election literature. It is not that I think the principle of council tax is unfair. It is the level at which it has been set. But I agree that, several years on, council tax has been manipulated to such an extent in England and Wales that I am not sure if we can continue with it. We may need to look at an alternative. We have an opportunity today to do something positive. We cannot come up with a new system overnight, but we can ensure that the system that we have is fairer. The alternative is to go ahead with re-banding at some point and to end up with more homelessness, more debt, more bankruptcies and more people going to prison. I urge Ministers and the Government to take responsibility for their policy and for council tax rises that are a direct result of their own policies. If they are not prepared to take responsibility, they will bear the responsibility at the next general election.