Business Rate Supplements Bill

I join my noble friend Lord Jenkin of Roding in welcoming these sensible amendments, which reflect the world as we now have it. The key point here must be engaging with the local business community and the people who might pay the business rate supplement. That is the purpose of Clause 5, we are told. These amendments simply expand that by providing a summary. That is a very good idea. A lot of these documents that will come forward will, necessarily, be extraordinarily long to cover the legal and financial data as well as the detailed plans. Simply saying that consultation consists of posting a huge pdf file on a government website somewhere so that somebody can download all 360 or 400 pages of it and trawl through it is clearly unacceptable, as well as being pretty bad practice for the environment when it comes to printing such a document. It ought to be there. In supporting the amendments I should like to press a little further to ask whether we can look at methods that have been employed in the private sector to communicate with people and to get feedback. For example, if this was a private sector document I am sure there would be a page of frequently asked questions as well as a summary of the document. Essentially, people want to check what it means for them and how much they have to pay. That is pretty simple. We should make sure that that information is available. Another point on which the technology has been available for a long time is the whole area of blogging. You can see on the BBC website and many commercial websites that this is a very good way not only of allowing people to see what the document means for them, but of seeing what other people in the local area have said about it. I would have thought that it would be the true mark of open government to move into allowing people to post responses on websites so that it all becomes part of the public domain rather than having to wait for the final document, which then again in hard copy summarises all the representations that have been made at great length. We also have to remember that we are dealing with the business community, which, by and large, is rushed off its feet, particularly at present. It does not have the luxury of government relations departments to pore through these documents; it has to do it itself. Anything we can do to make the document as succinct and clear as possible, to make it electronically available, and to make it possible for responses to be given in that same format would surely be in keeping with the modern era.