Business Rates

As I said, I am more than happy to take away requests that have been made for that information, because it is important that we are able to show the help that has been available. Perhaps Conservative Members would like to make a guesstimate of how many businesses would have been helped by opposing all the measures that we tried to take. It would be interesting to see if they were content to admit that if one says that one is going to do nothing, that is what happens to businesses. I think that the current business rates system is a fair way of ensuring that the burden of tax is fairly distributed across all businesses. Before 1990, as several of my right hon. and hon. Friends have said, rates were set and collected locally. The problem that was seen with that approach was that many businesses felt that they had little or no certainty over their business rate bills: they complained that they might be paying different rates in different areas, and that they might be told of their liability only a few days before the start of the financial year. The system that came into effect in 1990, which was enshrined in legislation introduced in 1988 by the previous Administration, changed the way that business rates were collected, bringing greater certainty, not least because businesses know that between revaluations the multiplier will not change by more than inflation. Many of the issues that we are debating are an integral part of that system. In 1990, we saw the first business rates revaluation of property since 1973. Before that time, values had become hopelessly out of date; that is why the new system requires revaluations every five years. The point of that, for a business, is that rateable values and therefore rates bills are based on up-to-date information, so the yield from the rates is spread fairly across different ratepayers.