Local Government Finance Bill

My hon. Friend, who is a clear expert in local government finance makes a valid point—[Interruption.] He certainly is, and he ran a very successful local authority. Throughout proceedings on the Bill, we have tried to get some certainty. But there is no certainty about resets. It is not certain whether the Government's aspiration will become a policy. The period is too long, and I suspect that in making it only an aspiration, the Government know that and are providing a get-out clause. They will not publish all the responses to their consultation, just a summary, but we know that the majority of respondents wanted a maximum of five years between resets, and many wanted a shorter period. This seems to have had no influence on the Government. The problem with a 10-year reset is that all the modelling shows that the gap between the richer and poorer authorities will increase, and the Government have rejected all attempts to link resources with need. Indeed, the baseline for the redistribution of business rates is the current local government financial settlement, which has already created disadvantage, whatever the Under-Secretary might seek to tell us.