Council Tax (New Valuation Lists for England) Bill

I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) for his advice, and I shall peruse the Act in greater detail as we proceed. However, given that I asked for a copy yesterday, it is not satisfactory to have to mug up and refresh my memory of an Act of Parliament that I helped to steer through the House as a Whip. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Mole Valley (Sir Paul Beresford) for initiating this debate. Whatever one’s view of the sloppy drafting of his amendment, this is an important debate. There are merits in the broad principle of his amendment, because it has often been impossible for Governments to conduct national revaluations. The revaluation scheduled for 1938 was deferred for two years, but the second world war broke out, so it never took place. A revaluation was scheduled for 1952, but it was deferred until 1953, and was eventually carried out in 1956. A revaluation was scheduled for 1961 under a Conservative Government, but it was deferred until 1963. The Labour Government that followed deferred the 1968 revaluation.—[Interruption.] Indeed, that Government did not carry out a revaluation at all, and it was Edward Heath’s Conservative Government who carried out a revaluation in 1973. Throughout our history, therefore, there have been occasional problems with getting national revaluations off the ground. If we cannot undertake a national revaluation we should consider whether it is worth undertaking a regional or partial revaluation. I therefore do not oppose the principle behind my hon. Friend’s amendment but, given its poor drafting, I am afraid that I cannot support him. I have explained why in my interventions. A politically motivated or malevolent Secretary of State, for example, may decide to make a blatant political order to carry out a revaluation of properties in areas that voted for another political party—perhaps the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats—to teach the residents a lesson. My right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst asked about judicial review, but I am not confident that such a review would work in those circumstances, because that Minister would be unlikely to say publicly that the basis of his decision was his wish to punish voters, even though that was the motivation behind his order.