Schedule 1
Business Rate Supplements Bill
4:00 pm
Brian Binley (Northampton South, Conservative)
I support the very important remarks made by my hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow, who has had a distinguished business career and is well versed in the work of business generally. I listened this morning to lots of argument and many claims of intellectualism. I am a practical man, as most business men tend to be, and that practicality is the very essence of the need for business to be involved. We have enough intellectualism to keep us going for many years—much of it sitting in this House. One of the things that we lack in this place is a practical and pragmatic approach to problems and the world of business generally. For the Government to eschew the opportunity for practical business involvement in any project that a local authority may wish to pursue under the Bill seems to be looking a gift horse in the mouth and refusing it.
I have already made the point that previous Government projections, both national and local, for sizeable infrastructure projects have been, in most people’s eyes, deplorable. I do not wish to embarrass the Government—this Government or previous ones, frankly—by going through a list of projections that proved to be so way out on their final total as to be embarrassing. We do not have to get started on the process of the Olympics to any great extent to know that to be the case. Crossrail saw sizeable increases in financial projections, and I do not believe that we are at the end of the game yet. The Government’s performance is decidedly poor in this area, yet there is an opportunity now to involve business, which is considerably more adept at the process. I hope that the Minister will accept the arguments made by business itself to be involved in the process and welcome the proposal with open arms.
This Government have talked a great deal about open government and transparency in government, yet they are now closing down the financial and management aspects of a given project from the very people who will be called on to pay quite a lot of money in support of that project, even though the expertise in the business sector far outweighs the expertise in that respect in government. This Government were specifically concerned about scrutiny in local government. They specifically made the point that there should be wider involvement in scrutiny—involvement greater than that of the elected members themselves—and provided the opportunity for other bodies to be involved in the whole scrutiny process of local government, yet now the Government are closing that down under the Bill. May I remind the Minister that we are talking about the possibility of sizeable private finance initiative projects linked to the tax? We have not explored that in great depth.