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

The Minister's speech was extraordinary. He spent the first half telling us, ““This is how other businesses up and down the country are handled, and businesses in ports should expect to be handled like every other business.”” However, towards the end of his speech he admitted that the arrangement had involved a large transfer from port rating companies, many of whom, he concedes, knew absolutely nothing about the matter, to the port owners, many of whom are in direct competition with their tenants. The Government have their own guidelines on retrospection, and the Minister must know that he has broken them. They were set out in Hansard on 9 October 2008 at column 802W. I ask the House to envisage a warehouse in a port. Such a warehouse could be in one of at least four different situations, none of which have anything to do with its operations. First, it may be owned by the port owner, in which case it is exempt from the new arrangements. The second possibility—I have seen two warehouses side by side run on different bases—is that it could be owned by an unfortunate tenant who has just been slapped with an enormous, four-year, backdated bill. Thirdly, it could be owned by a tenant in one of the ports—there are a number of them—that the Valuation Office Agency has managed to miss in its exercise. The fourth and final possibility is that the warehouse could be in a port where the owner got in clever lawyers early on, arranged a shared arrangement between more than one tenant, and so was able to avoid the problem. To suggest that the status quo has tidied matters up and brought the arrangements in ports in line with those in the rest of the country is just fantasy. The truth is that the arrangements are a muddle. They have been condemned by the Treasury Committee and in a non-fatal motion in another place. In the real world, the arrangements are progressively destroying large numbers of small businesses: Thomas Nichols Brown has gone bust in Liverpool; DFDS, a huge Danish shipping company, made 71 people redundant in January; Stanton Grove on the Mersey has a huge bill of more than £2 million; and Brittany Ferries in Plymouth, Poole—the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Poole (Mr. Syms)—and Portsmouth faces a bill of £500,000. A whole string of organisations, some of which could afford to pay the bills, have simply said that they will pull out of the UK. To add insult to injury, in contradiction to the original announcement, the Minister's office has confirmed that if a tenant goes bust and that tenant's property reverts to the port owner, the port owner will not be faced with an empty property rates bill; the property will revert back to the original arrangement. How fair is that? There are other people who want to speak, so I shall end with one last example. David Johnson of RMS Group Holdings Ltd—a man who deserves to be praised for the vigorous way in which he has spoken up time and again for his company and for other people like him—says that his company faces a 1,700 per cent. rate increase as well as four years' backdating. That is no way to run a tax system, and no way to run a country.