Council Tax (New Valuation Lists for England) Bill

Last Thursday, in answer to a question that I put to him during business questions, the Leader of the House said that he thought that the idea of programming Report stage and Third Readings raised constitutional questions. I am not sure that I agree. A lack of strict programming of this afternoon’s business might have made things much worse. During the debate on amendment No. 3, I was fascinated to see what it is like to attend a meeting of the 1922 committee, but the Bill survived that unfortunate experience. The Minister of Communities and Local Government emphasised on Second Reading, and the Minister for Local Government repeated in Committee, that the context of the Bill was the revision of the remit of the Lyons review of local government to encompass function in addition to finance. That context has now changed and we are looking forward to a White Paper on local government which will take into account not only finance and function, but structure. I welcomed that announcement, especially as I called for a White Paper last Wednesday in Westminster Hall. I had no idea that the Government were so responsive to Opposition calls made in Westminster Hall debates. The Bill started out as a small part of a large picture and has now become a very small part of a very big picture. I hope to see a much more long-term constitutional approach to local government, rather than the short-term political approach that produced the Bill. As we have said all along, the Bill has its uses. We stated our support for it on Second Reading and we shall continue that support on Third Reading. We support it largely because our proposed reform of local government finance would involve the cancelling of the next revaluation, for the obvious reason that a local income tax requires no property valuations of any sort. Whether the Bill is passed or not, council tax will remain a bad tax. As the hon. Member for Upminster (Angela Watkinson) said, one of the great problems of council tax is its weak relationship to ability to pay, and revaluation does not affect that much. A group of people who are rarely mentioned in our debates are tenants, especially tenants of councils or local housing associations. It is often assumed that council tax is a type of wealth tax—that it is related to the wealth of the taxpayer. In fact, for a quarter of the population that is not so and any revaluation does not affect that.