Rating and Valuation (S.I., 2009, No. 204)

We will try terribly hard to put the hon. Gentleman out of his misery. He is right—I left out the decimal point. I thought that it was £2.4 million, but it has gone up; now it is even more. [Hon. Members: ““How are you going to vote?””] The more hon. Members want to ask questions that I am not going to answer yet, the longer this will go on. How they exercise themselves is entirely a matter for them. The genuinely serious question that arises is how to deal with this creation, which is certainly not the fault of the businesses that were unable to plan for it. This has been debated time and again. The hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell) secured a Westminster Hall debate, which was well attended and where the case against the Government was comprehensively put. We prayed against the motion to enable us to have a debate in the Commons. The matter was recently debated in the other place, where—owing to its procedure—a non-fatal motion of regret was passed by their lordships, giving them the opportunity to ventilate the inadequacy of the Government's response to the situation. Their response—I am sure that the Minister will explain it to us patiently, as he has before—is to enable the liability to be spread over eight years. That is all well and good, but it does not solve the basic problem that still arises: the liability is still there and businesses will still have to pay a massive amount that they can ill afford. Moreover, because the liability accrues in one year, it will have to be carried on to their books as a liability in the first year, even though the payment is spread over a longer period.