Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 9:32 pm on 28 February 1991.
Of course I can give an assurance that sensitivity to income will be taken into account. I can give a further assurance: that as time goes on, and as the Inland Revenue conducts its research, the rating system will be refined and improved still further. All hon. Members know that property taxes are common through the European Community. That is what we shall put to the electorate, and on that basis we shall win the election convincingly.
However, we are not talking just about the fair rates system that we shall introduce. We are making it clear that the poll tax, as it stands, is the direct responsibility of the Government and their supporters in this House. They cannot wriggle out of it. When Ministers line up one by one to dump it for fear of losing their seats, we shall make certain that people know who is responsible for the introduction of a tax which is hated universally in Wales and in the rest of the United Kingdom.
The initiatives of the Secretary of State and of his predecessor—the valleys initiative, the rural initiatives—are, of course, welcomed by Opposition Members, but, as has been said already, the bodies that are being used to implement these proposals—the Welsh Development Agency and the Land Authority for Wales—were actually set up by a Labour Government. They will be refined by a Labour Government, and we shall extend the principle throughout the United Kingdom so that the benefits that we in Wales have had may be enjoyed by everyone, but we are concerned also about the way Conservative Members treat our local authorities.
Comments of the Under-Secretary of State for Wales suggested that the Conservative party now believes that our local authorities no longer have a role in housing. Our local councils, with all the expertise that they have built up over the years, will no longer play a role in providing houses for our people. That is a great sadness to us all, since councils have cleared our slums, have provided houses with bathrooms for all our people, and have given the people of south and north Wales good housing. To deny them their heritage is a disgrace.
About 70,000 people still linger on our housing waiting lists in Wales, and between 10,000 and 15,000 people are homeless. My hon. Friend the Member for Ogmore referred to TECs and I think that it is also a disgrace that Tai Cymru, the body which is supposed to deal with housing in Wales, has not one representative of Welsh local government on its board. Obviously that fits in with the ideas of the hon. Member for Pembroke (Mr. Bennett), who earlier this month was talking about local authorities having no role to play in the provision of public housing in our Principality.
This morning, the Labour party in Wales talked about our new housing policy. We said that we need to use capital receipts to build more houses: we need a crash programme on homelessness, and at least 30,000 homes need to be built.
It seems to me and to my right hon. and hon. Friends that the past decade has left a Tory legacy which will be remembered in the forthcoming election. The Tories have inflicted a wounding recession upon the Welsh people, which has meant record bankruptcies, a return to the high unemployment of the early 1980s and a staggering decline in our manufacturing base. They have imposed an unfair and wretched tax on our people. They have demoralised our teachers and our doctors, undermined local democracy in Wales and worked against, and not with, our local councils. For all those reasons, and for many others, they will be swept away in the election that is most surely not far away.