Business Rates and the Recession

I know the Minister has his back to the wall, but, if I may say so, he really is struggling a bit. It is not, I hope, normal practice in the valuation business for changes to be carried out retrospectively without impact assessments and without consultation. If it is, that says a lot about those ultimately responsible for the VOA—and the ultimate responsibility lies, of course, with Ministers. What is special about the ports sector is that it is particularly vulnerable to this measure, and firms are starting to go out of business. Nothing the Government can say will get them off the hook on this, and I regret that the Minister is, perhaps on orders from above, still digging himself into this position. That follows on from the response of the Department to the House of Lords debate last week, where the Government position was condemned by their Lordships, and the next day the Government issued a statement saying, "Nothing has changed, and we carry on as before." This Government are turning into a modern-day version of the Bourbons, as that is an attitude we could have expected from Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI in Versailles. The only difference is that the Government are saying, "You can have eight years to eat the cake," but what they do not understand is that the cake will choke the businesses in the interim. That is why this is wrong. The Government have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. If we add all these things together, we are left with a catalogue of failure. I have referred to supplementary business rates, but there is also the winding down of the local authority business growth incentives—LABGI—scheme. There have been wholly inadequate responses from the Government.