Business Rate Supplements Bill

I shall make a few brief comments, particularly on new clause 1, because I want to save most of my remarks for the later group dealing with ballots. I pursued an argument in Committee about the changes in local government during the past 15 or 20 years, and the lack of trust. I am not sure whether the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Dan Rogerson) trusts his Liberal Democrat-run councils, but I trust my Labour council to make the right decisions. It is a Labour council that has this year again had a four-star rating, and it has done remarkable work on regeneration and economic delivery in the borough of Halton and working more widely with Merseyside and Cheshire. The new clause is over-prescriptive in telling local government what it should do. If I were to criticise what this Government have done over the past 12 years, I would say that we have sometimes been a bit over-prescriptive about local government. My right hon. Friend the Minister, dare I say it, took a different view in a number of areas about trusting local government and giving it some say in decisions. It is fine to legislate, and there must be safeguards; one of the safeguards in the Bill is that the Secretary of State can intervene if the procedures laid down in it are not being followed. I feel that there is an in-built distrust of local government in this House, however, and a lack of willingness to give it more freedom to get on and deliver what many local authorities are already delivering through their tremendous economic development and regeneration policies. I believe that the new clause is over-prescriptive, and we should trust local government more. In these difficult economic times, I do not believe for one moment that local government will do something stupid such as putting businesses and jobs at risk in its own area. I do not think that that will happen.