Business Rates

No; instead I will try to make swift progress so as to give the hon. Gentleman a chance to make his own contribution. We think that the automated business rate relief is a sensible idea, but it is not an entirely original idea because it has already been achieved in Wales. I was disappointed by the Government's justifications for not introducing it. The reality is that half of all eligible businesses do not claim the relief, and automating it will therefore make the whole process more efficient, not more costly. Although there is, perhaps, consensus on this issue, I am not entirely sure what the hon. Member for Putney (Justine Greening) committed her party to. The Leader of the Opposition continually calls on people to vote for change, but the evidence at present suggests that it would be a vote merely to change the labels on the same tin. There is no radical rethink. If we really want to understand what is going on in this regard, the name of the party gives the game away: the fact that they are called the "Conservatives" means that they generally want to change things back to the way they were before—and therefore they do not want to revalue, nor to set business rates according to inflation, nor to change anything with regard to the way business rates work. We heard nothing about anything they would do differently. As I have said, their approach is intellectually incoherent. It is consistent only with the way they look at another aspect of local government finance: council tax. Their approach is that the system is broken and unaffordable, but the way to solve that is, apparently, not by revaluing, and we will therefore end up having a system of local taxation based on property values that are decades out of date. They either need to say the system of council tax is bust and that they will replace it with something else, or they need to defend the council tax system and offer a revaluation. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Putney asks from a sedentary position about my party's position. Our position is very clear. It involves changing the balance of funding so that more that is spent locally is raised locally. That will partly be achieved through localising business rates entirely and moving to a system of local taxation based on the ability to pay. We are very clear about that, and we are very happy to explain how we will achieve it. The Conservatives, however, have not said what they would do.