Business Rate Supplements Bill

My appearance at the table here beside my noble friends Lord Bates and Lord Cathcart does not suggest that we have changed places. I hope noble Lords will forgive me, but it is simply easier for me to hear sitting here than it has been when sitting behind. A number of us in the House suffer from various levels of hearing impairment and I am certainly one of them. We will see how we get on. I support the amendments, but I would like to add one thing. I do not know whether other noble Lords have been following the proceedings of the Select Committee under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Renton of Mount Harry, which is looking at the relations between this House and the public. One of the things that has stood out even from just the first two or three evidence sessions—I spent part of the weekend looking through the most recent one—is that concentrating on written documents being available at libraries and being sent within certain deadlines or available for inspection within a certain number of days is yesterday’s technology. Increasingly, one is hearing that it is the availability of electronic communications, and in particular of the internet, that is important. Huge numbers of people and businesses in this country and elsewhere rely on the internet to be aware of what is going on. If one is going to ask local authorities putting together their prospectus for a BRS to make sure that the people who are going to be affected by it have an early opportunity to see what is there and perhaps an opportunity to comment, that is by far the most effective method now. That is today’s and tomorrow’s technology. I am not quarrelling with the noble Baroness’s amendments, which are a useful addition to the Bill, but I hope that local authorities now recognise that if they are going to communicate with the businesses in their area, it might make a great deal of sense that they should do it primarily through electronic means. I believe that this is what we are going to have to do. We await the report of the Select Committee, but having seen some of the evidence I hope that it will recognise that. Some noble Lords already have their own blogs. That is one of the ways in which you reach a wider audience. It is not necessarily for a conversation—you can waste an awful lot of time doing that—but simply to make information available. It seems to me that that is what the clause and the amendments are about and I would be grateful if the Minister could comment on that.