Business Rate Supplements Bill

I, too, praise the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich for the way in which he spoke to his proposal. He has drawn the House's attention to a very important matter, and if some Ministers spoke to their amendments in similar detail and with similar concern for the House, we would have much better informed debates generally, and maybe better legislation. [Interruption.] I am not referring to the Minister dealing with the debate today, but if he feels that my remark applies to him, I hope that he will demonstrate shortly that it need not do so. He certainly made no sensible contribution to the earlier debate on the allocate of time, but we live in hope that he might make a sensible response to the points that we are making about the Bill, as I believe he did in Committee. I think that the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich is trying to paper over some cracks with this proposal. As a Minister, he was the architect and sponsor of the BIDs scheme, which has met with quite a lot of approval in the places that it has affected. It has been used in areas with councils of different political persuasions, often to good effect. However, he sees the danger that the supplementary levy will hit exactly the same people who are financing the BIDs scheme, at a time when the world has changed dramatically. I am afraid that the Minister has to deal with the very important point that all these schemes—the BIDs idea, the supplementary levy and some of the other ideas that the Government have floated and not proceeded with—rested on the heroic assumptions that rents and property values would go up and that most properties would find tenants very easily. The idea was to try to capture, for the public sector and the common weal, some of the enhanced value that the private sector seems to create so easily. The aim, through the variation of levies and betterment charges and so on, was that some of the gain could be shared, as well as to provide public infrastructure and support to the glamorous private sector developments that were going ahead. This is not the place to debate all that again. Indeed, I do not think that we can have that sort of debate any more anyway, because that is no longer what the real world is like. In today's real world, there will be fewer tenants and more void properties. Rentals are falling and could fall a lot further, while commercial property values have fallen some 30 per cent. from their peak and many experts feel that they will fall further. That is not a good background for doubling charges, and the proposed scheme looks like one that might have been designed by a firm called by Clobber and Clobber. That is, an area is clobbered first of all with a BID, and then again with the supplementary levy.