Council Tax Revaluation

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 3:04 pm on 19 October 2005.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Nick Raynsford Nick Raynsford Labour, Greenwich and Woolwich 3:04, 19 October 2005

No, I will not.

The hon. Member for Brent, East has already had a good opportunity and made a mess of it. She should hear a few facts. There is a problem with take-up of council tax benefit. Had she put the case for those who do not receive it, I would have had some sympathy with her, but she advanced the extraordinary proposition that the circumstances she described applied to the poorest pensioners after their receipt of benefit. I am sorry, but that is economically illiterate.

The second example of economic illiteracy was the response to the challenge issued by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Attercliffe, who asked how a PAYE-based system of local income tax would deal with those outside the PAYE system. The hon. Member for Brent, East said that they would be subject to a different form of taxation, based to some extent on business rates. That would of course mean every property in the country having to be valued, yet the hon. Lady persisted in her claim that ending property valuations would save £300 million. That is typical of the Liberal Democrats. They do not do their sums, or their sums do not add up, and no one believes that a local income tax would generate the benefits that they claim for it.

Having said that, I should add that I have serious reservations about the Government's wish to postpone revaluation. Revaluation is an essential component of any system based on property values, as has been pointed out by my hon. Friends this afternoon and also by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors in its excellent briefing paper.

The year 1991, the current basis for valuation, is now 14 years behind us, and it is increasingly unreal to base valuations on 1991 values. In my constituency, areas that were derelict industrial wastelands in 1991—