Council Tax (New Valuation Lists for England) Bill

That is another of my concerns. Given the wording of the amendment, I am not satisfied with the phraseology that my hon. Friend has used. He says that the Secretary of State may make an"““order . . . in relation to an individual billing authority, a group of adjoining billing authorities””." I cannot grasp why my hon. Friend felt it necessary to use the words ““adjoining billing authorities””. If the amendment merely referred to a number of billing authorities and omitted ““adjoining””, I could understand that approach. As I said when I intervened on him earlier, the use of a limiting word in the amendment means that the Secretary of State may not be able to make orders for comparable billing authorities. In my view, the drafting of the amendment is dangerously defective. For that reason, it cannot be supported.