Business Rate Supplements Bill

Yes. I do not want to make this party political, although I have had experience of what my hon. Friend mentions, but a council of any kind could become unpopular. It might make itself unpopular by proposing one of the supplementary levies provided for in the Bill, no doubt on top of a large council tax increase at the capping threshold. Yet under the new schedule, local authorities would not just be given the power to have a third of the representatives and to choose the third who are perhaps intended to be more independent, although that is not stated. They would be given the power to choose the whole lot. The business community might choose for the board two or three good people who, despite all the obvious aggravation and the lack of wisdom involved in sitting on one of these things, decided that they wanted to do so because there was a big project. The local authority would have every right to say, "No, we're not having them. We would rather have some friendly, helpful people who are of our political disposition or agree with us about this project", so that there would be no grit in the oyster and no challenge to how the project was going ahead. The new schedule reveals a weak system, which in certain circumstances would prevent the board from acting as an accountable body with control over costs and responsibility for better project management. If a local authority were determined to drive something through, against the interests of its electorate, it could do so. That is a great weakness in the system that is suggested. We are told that a board would be established""at the first instance of an initial prospectus being published for the imposition of an approved BRS"," and that it would continue for the whole period for which the BRS existed. That means that it would be a long task in many cases, and that, too, would make it more difficult to get people of good quality on the board. We are told:""In appointing members to the Board the levying authority must have regard to the desirability of securing that the Board is able to perform its functions effectively and efficiently."" That is a very wide suggestion, and I do not believe that it requires a local authority to have much discipline in choosing people of substance who are likely to provide the critical analysis and accountability that we would like. We are told that everything else will be sorted out in regulations—doubtless, they are still to be drafted. I therefore have more sympathy with the more wide-ranging amendment 16, in which my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) leaves open the question whether we need such a body, and correctly directs attention to the lack of accountability in the projects if we do not provide for some sort of mechanism. We are here, even at such a late stage in the Bill's progress, to tell the Government that there is a genuine problem of accountability. The system is unsatisfactory anyway, in that it enables the imposition of big levies on local communities in times of stress. If there is no proper system for engaging them and getting them to believe that a project is well run and that the expenditure is properly controlled, that makes matters far worse. Amendment 16 gives scope for the Government to make regulations under the Bill that might get nearer the mark. I therefore hope that the Government will use new clause 1 as a prod and a stimulus to improve their Bill. I do not believe that it is quite right, for the reasons that I identified and for others with which I shall not delay House. Perhaps amendment 16 provides a way forward if the Government are willing, and if they are prepared to produce regulations to give some accountability under the law.