Business Rate Supplements Bill

I appreciate the Minister’s expressions of concern and I do not doubt that they are genuine, but perhaps we need to go back to the almost total lack of business experience among his departmental advisers. The reality is that simply spreading the payment does not remove the liability. The problem facing businesses is that under the accounting rules they have to bring the whole of their liability into the current year’s account and put it on the balance sheet, so, with the rates due by 31 January, that could push many of them into a position where they were trading insolvently. That is the bit that the Government do not seem to grasp. However well intentioned the proposal for spreading the payment may be, it does not get businesses around the legal problem that pushes them into insolvency—as it has done in two cases. If the Minister could come up with a solution to that problem, I should be the first to applaud him and welcome it, but so far the Government’s measures—whatever their intention—have not addressed that crucial issue. That is why there is a real threat to businesses in the ports. The Bill has missed yet another opportunity. The late Iain Macleod, an international-standard bridge player, once observed that politics was rather like bridge: timing is everything. In the current economic climate the timing of the Bill would certainly not bring the Government to international standards; their timing would relegate them not from the bridge club but from the under-fives tiddlywinks league. I honestly hope that the Government will reflect on a Bill that is likely to do considerably more harm than good and will undermine many of the objectives shared by Members on both sides of the House in this time of economic difficulties.