Council Tax (New Valuation Lists for England) Bill

Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. My hon. Friend has made his point, and I agree with it, but I shall not go down that route. How do we make the process more transparent? One way is proposed in the amendment. Where it is obvious that the incidence of the council tax has ceased to reflect properly the nature of the area involved, there needs to be a way to remedy that by means of a local revaluation. That is the justification behind this proposal. However, if it is a question of perception, whose perception matters? I disagree with my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Mr. Knight) about that. He and I worked at the Department of the Environment in close harmony and, as far as I am concerned at least, with considerable pleasure. However, in this instance, I believe that he has thought too much about the central issue, and too little about the local issue. Because of that, in the end I decided that I could not support the amendment quite as I had hoped. If there is a perception of unfairness of incidence in a locality, local people should be able to ask, through the local council, for a revaluation. Councils in East Dorset, Christchurch, Suffolk Coastal or Waveney could say, ““We want a revaluation because we can’t fairly deal with our population as a result of the huge change that has taken place. We need, therefore, to check out the incidence of the council tax, so as to be fair to the people who elect us.”” In such circumstances, I believe that it should be necessary for the Secretary of State to allow a revaluation. He should not be able to say, ““You can ask, but I’m not going to do it.”” He should be required to allow the revaluation, because many people outside the House may be surprised by the mechanisms available to the Secretary of State to put pressure on people. It is for that reason that I dissent about the amendment. I cannot go into detail, for fear of straying out of order, but we have been talking about the Thames Gateway in particular. In that area, it might not be possible to build many of the houses intended because of the flood plain. What would happen if the Deputy Prime Minister insisted that the houses were built and the insurance industry refused to insure them? The valuation situation would then be very complex, but it would be localised, not nationalised. At the moment, the Secretary of State has outrageously bamboozled the insurance industry by ensuring that the life offices put pressure on those that insure houses by saying, ““If you get uppity with the Secretary of State, we will be in trouble over pensions provision, so don’t do it.”” We all know the institutional corruption that goes on—Governments use their power over one lot to make others not do something. I hope that the insurance industry will develop some toughness in that area. If the houses are built in the Thames Gateway, their value will be crucially affected by whether they can be insured, and a local revaluation will be essential if there is to be fairness in the incidence of the tax. I hope that we do not reach that situation because, as an environmentalist, I do not want those houses to be built. I do not understand why we are trying to shove into the south-east of England houses that could, in today’s world of communication, be spread more evenly over the nation. But then this is about the least environmental Government that we have had for a long time. My right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst does not help by holding up the one Bill that has been introduced that has been worth having. I hope that he will change his mind about that. The local revaluation suggested by my hon. Friend the Member for Mole Valley would be essential if significant local changes occurred that needed to be taken into account. I note that even those who have opposed this particular formulation, who come from a local government background, have emphasised the need for such a change. It would therefore be foolish of the Government to avoid it. This is an issue of transparency and perception. Therefore, one has to face up to the second difficulty that the amendment presents. It could be used for purposes totally other than those that were conceived. Some of those purposes might be reasonable, but would not be suitably covered by this amendment. Let us for a moment accept that it might be sensible to have an elite group of people who went round the country carrying out valuations, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst suggested, which might be cheaper. The people need not even be employed by the Valuation Office Agency, because they could be employed privately, or seconded, or paid for under some tender system. The trouble is that the amendment would give no guidance to the Secretary of State as to the basis on which that sequential activity should be performed. My hon. Friend, in explaining that, gave us to understand that that was not really his purpose for the amendment, although my right hon. Friend rightly identified it as a possible advantage. I would go further. One of the reasons I liked the amendment was because it would enable pilot schemes to be carried out in several places, so we would be able to see whether the perception of our constituents that a change in valuation would be unfair to them was true or not. Indeed, one of the problems, Mr. Deputy Speaker—you represent a neighbouring constituency to mine—that we have all found in this debate, across party lines, is that people feared that whatever the valuation was, it would do them down. The only way to deal with such a fear may be to carry out a localised valuation in certain places that are sufficiently different so that one could discover whether revaluation had the effect in England that it had in Wales. Of course the amendment would have an advantage. Unlike in Wales, where no ceiling was imposed and such things were not done in the same envelope, if a revaluation took place in an area, it would have to reach the same total that obtained before the reassessment realigned the weight on any property. The problem in Wales was that a lot more money came out at the other end. Of course, everyone knows that that is what the Government intended, which is why we opposed the revaluation in the first place. Such a system could be used for the valuable purpose that I propose, but only if regulations were laid down to ensure that it could not be misused. For example, a revaluation should be triggered only by the local authority, except if a pilot scheme was restricted to a certain number to ensure that it was used for the intended purpose. There is a disadvantage in the amendment, because we have not covered that issue and we should try to do so.