Council Tax (New Valuation Lists for England) Bill

I, too, rise to support the Bill and I hope that it will not spend too long in Committee. As a two-clause Bill, I suspect that there is little chance of that; nevertheless, I believe that the Bill is sensible, timely and appropriate. I say that as one who, before coming to this place, has had experience as a parish councillor, a district councillor and a county councillor. The reasons for the delay in the revaluation are, as I say, sensible. They are not about avoiding a meltdown in the council tax system, because I do not believe that that was imminent, but about providing an opportunity to review the entire local government structure. Speaking as one who trained in physiology for my degree many years ago, I fully understand the relationship between structure and function. In fact, as far as local government is concerned, we cannot separate the two any more than we could in biological mechanisms in my earlier physiological study. It is also necessary to avoid too many changes. That might sound odd in view of the record over recent years, but if we were to have a revaluation followed by a change in the council tax system—either to another property-based system or to a local income tax system, perish the thought, or to some new as yet unthought-of imaginative system for relating the delivery of local services to the ability of local communities to afford them—that change would be big enough in itself for local authorities, the central Government and the House to cope with. To have a revaluation going on at the same time as we are preparing for that would not be the most sensible use of our time and would militate against the measures proposed in the Bill. My hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, South (Sir Peter Soulsby) was in danger of underselling himself as a respected leader of his council. He certainly made some good appointments in his time, not least one of my relatives—although I hasten to add that that was long before I knew him. However, I agree with him that the decision to widen the remit of the Lyons review is at the heart of the reason for the delay in revaluation. I was not able to be here for the earlier part of the debate, but I have been fascinated by what I have heard. For example, I would like to know why the hon. Member for Cambridge (David Howarth), who is unfortunately not in his place, thinks that we should prejudge the outcome of a review of the whole function and structure of local government by saying that a local income tax is the only solution to all of local government’s problems. I do not agree, and any solution has to be seen in the context of the new role for local government and the new functions that we anticipate it will take on.