My hon. Friend may well be right, and his Select Committee will doubtless keep a close eye on the matter. I hope that the Minister will give us some answers tonight, but I am sure that, if he does not, Ministers in the other place will be pressed on the point.
The other gaping hole in the Bill is the absence of any specific measure that would tell us when and how the Government would deal with the reset in the future. The two options that they presented in their statement of intent last week could lead to fundamentally different outcomes. There could be a full reset, whereby all the business rate growth up to the point of the reset was redistributed—meaning, in effect, that the baseline of the whole system would be reset by means of the new, and total, business rates pot—or there could be a partial reset, meaning that business growth would be retained at local level, and just the initial baseline would be reset. That represents a very wide range of possibilities for local authorities. If the Minister wants authorities to be able to plan for the future on the basis of the new system, he must provide them with some of the answers to such questions, sooner rather than later.