Business Rate Supplements Bill

I will speak also to Amendments 20, 21 and 22. These amendments are about the prospectus that has to be issued as part of the consultative process. In part they come from the Federation of Small Businesses. The prospectus may be a complex document; I think it will have to be. My amendments provide for summaries of the prospectus, not to avoid the need for clarity, but to ensure that the information is accessible in every way. There may well be campaigns around the proposals for the use of the business rate supplement. We all know how readily issues can be oversimplified. It is important that people can find a jargon-free explanation of the proposal which they can absorb without having to spend too long on it. My amendments propose that a summary as well as the full prospectus should be on the website and available for inspection. Amendment 21 is about the availability of the prospectus. It follows an amendment tabled by my honourable friend the Member for North Cornwall in the Commons Committee. Like him, I am proposing that a copy of the prospectus should be available at the principal offices of the billing authorities, if the levying authority is not also the billing authority. I thought that my honourable friend’s amendment produced one of the less persuasive responses from the Government on this Bill. The Minister argued that putting a copy of the prospectus in what would essentially be a small number of town halls would create additional costs and that accessibility should be balanced with those additional costs. He said: ""We need to show some restraint, therefore, in the requirements that we place on authorities"." There are a lot of requirements being placed on authorities and I would have thought that copying a prospectus or running off another copy from the computer was not nearly as onerous as some of the things that they may have to do. He said: ""Making copies available in the principal offices of the lower-tier authorities could lead to confusion for ratepayers"," who might think that the upper-tier authority was responsible. He also said that, ""good local authorities … would respect the views of key stakeholders and ensure that copies were available but does he believe that we in Whitehall should impose that throughout the country?".—[Official Report, Commons Business Rate Supplements Bill Committee, 27/1/09; cols. 137-38.]" Whitehall imposes an awful lot and I think that this is something that it could very usefully impose. It is an utterly feeble response to a practical suggestion. I became the chair of my local authority's planning committee at a time when planning was being opened up to the public quite dramatically. I discussed with officers my proposal that copies of planning applications should go into local libraries so that people could see them somewhere that was convenient. The arguments that I was faced with were the cost and breach of copyright. I said, "Well, let’s do it and see what happens". Nothing happened, except that people were able to go and see the applications somewhere local to them. I do not think that this is a major item in terms of complication, complexity or cost. I hope that the Government can look more favourably on it. Amendment 22 provides that as well as the prospectus being available at all reasonable times of the day, it should be available for a reasonable period of time, which speaks for itself. It may well be implied that that would have to be so, but if the reasonable times of the day are spelt out, I wonder whether I am right in thinking that "for a reasonable period" would not actually be implied. These are minor matters compared with the totality of the proposals in the Bill, but they would make it a great deal simpler for those who are going to be asked to pay to find out what they are being asked to contribute to and to be able to take decisions accordingly. I beg to move.