Council Tax (New Valuation Lists for England) Bill

The amendment has a superficial attraction. If one reads it quickly and not too deeply, it sounds rather good, especially to those of us who would love Secretaries of State to come to the House as frequently as possible to give an account of themselves. Goodness knows, some of them do it little enough. However, on reflection I am not sure whether the amendment would work in that way. On what basis would the Secretary of State report after having made the decision? How would the reasons that the Secretary of State would be obliged to give, under the amendment, be communicated to the House? You and I can bet, Mr Deputy Speaker, that it would not be through an oral statement, because these days we have the trendy new process, which was sold to us as an improvement, called the written ministerial statement. More and more ministerial statements are smuggled on to the Order Paper in written form, which means that nobody can question them. I can predict with absolute certainty that that will be the vehicle chosen by Secretaries of State to fulfil the requirements of the first part of the amendment. One immediately runs into a difficulty. If I thought that there was any way of getting any Minister to come to the House, give a proper account of himself and be questioned, I would be all for it. I would not mind if the House spent almost all its time questioning Ministers on this and that—it would give us less time to pass increasingly silly Bills from the Government and elsewhere. I have no objection in principle to mechanisms whereby Ministers must come to the House and give reasons, but that is not what the amendment says. It leaves unspecified the way in which reasons would be given to the House for the decision taken once a year.