Clause 1 - Dates on which new valuation lists must be compiled for England
Council Tax (New Valuation Lists for England) Bill
11:00 am
Phil Woolas (Minister of State (Local Government), Office of the Deputy Prime Minister; Oldham East and Saddleworth, Labour)
My hon. Friend makes an important point, which I urge him to make, as will I, to the Lyons inquiry. The point behind his intervention is also pertinent to the fact that a single-person home receives a 25 per cent. discount on council tax. If a second resident of the home is not registered on the electoral register, that would in effect mean the avoidance of 25 per cent. of the tax and has the consequential effect of reducing the number of people on the electoral register and, therefore, its credibility. In addition, part of the funding blocks are indirectly affected by the total number of people on the electoral register, so there is an implication for local government funding from central Government as well as from the council tax payers. I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention.
When I have covered the points on amendment No. 2, I will answer the specific points that the hon. Gentleman made about the principles in the round. We readily accept the argument for revaluation of council tax to maintain a fair alignment between house prices and council tax bands. In my view, if someone accepts a property tax, they must accept, unlike the hon. Member for Poole (Mr. Syms), that valuation follows from it. Having said that, we can see no case for the regular publication of assessments of house price movements, which the amendment would require.
I am sure that the hon. Member for Cambridge thinks that the Government are being cynical and are hiding behind this argument because he believes that we do not wish to publish such information. I will give him some powerful reasons why his amendment would not achieve what he wants it to do. The real problem with this proposal is that it is based on, or at least leads inevitably to, the highly questionable notion that there must be some sort of objective golden rule which would lead, or even require, the Secretary of State, or anyone else, to determine whether a particular level of divergence did or did not justify a revaluation.
The idea seems to be that if X number of houses in band Y had moved up in price by more than Z per cent., there would more or less automatically be a case for revaluation. Furthermore, by implication, if the Government then decided, for whatever reason, not to proceed with revaluation, notwithstanding that evidence, they would somehow be flunking the issue. Conversely, the implication is equally that if a particular level of divergence had not been established, an insufficient case would have been made to warrant a revaluation. I reject the implication both that a particular level of property price movement necessarily justifies revaluation and that divergence that falls short of that level of property price movement precludes any case for revaluation.
What, moreover, are we to do about the complications in house price divergence at sub-regional level? To refer to the argument of the hon. Member for Poole, what if there is no significant variation in house price movements between regions, but there is variation within billing authorities—or, perhaps, within some billing authorities but not within others?
If I correctly understand the arguments made on Second Reading, the position of the official Opposition is that the recent narrowing of divergence between regions—not sub-regionally—removes the case for revaluation. I do not share that view for the reasons that I have given. This Liberal Democrat amendment might not have been tabled on the basis that such a view is implied, but, whatever the intentions of those who tabled it, that is certainly what will be inferred by many commentators before long.
Let me be clear about this: revaluation is not simply about reflecting divergence in prices across the property market, and still less about any particular degree of divergence. That is not the case for revaluation.