Confidence in Her Majesty's Government

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 3:44 pm on 27 March 1991.

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Photo of Mr Neil Kinnock Mr Neil Kinnock Leader of HM Official Opposition, Leader of the Labour Party, Member, Labour Party National Executive Committee 3:44, 27 March 1991

I shall send a copy of our proposals to the hon. Lady, who will see that they contain no proposition more centralising than that of the rates system that we intend to reintroduce.

The Government ploughed on with the poll tax despite the advice coming from hundreds of Tory councillors, ssmall businesses, a variety of independent sources and those supporting them that the poll tax was wrong and could never work. They got rid of the right hon. Member for Finchley. They had a review, and then a review of the review. They introduced the poll tax capping criteria that caught some Tory councils. The whole squandering sequence cost £400 million to set up, £300 million a year to maintain, £6 billion to try to mitigate and £1·5 billion a year because of revenue lost from the 7·5 million people who could not pay their poll tax. Now, on top of that, they are to spend £4·25 billion in VAT—and still the turmoil goes on.

Until Monday of this week, we were being told that 18 million people would benefit from the Government's community charge reduction scheme, then the figure became 8 million—although it came from the Minister of State, who usually gets things wrong—and then it became 16 million. When there are such variations, it is obviously necessary for everyone to have a clear description of how their reductions are being worked out. Therefore, I was glad that this morning the Department of the Environment provided the public with an explanation, reported by Mr. Timmins of The Independent. According to the Department of the Environment, the calculation will be as follows: You take two times the reduced community charge, minus, in brackets, the old rateable value plus one £52 threshold for a couple, two for three people and so on. The result is divided by two, three or four, depending on the number of adults in the household. That gives you the amount of reduction each. That is taken away from the reduced community charge to work out what people actually pay.The Independent also states: Those who have moved this financial year will now qualify—although not if they move again next year. Nothing could be clearer than that! I am sure that, if the Department of the Environment has got anything wrong, the Prime Minister will rectify any errors when he speaks later.

Meanwhile, the costs of the poll tax system go on piling up—£18 million a day. We have a panic decision to scrap existing poll tax bills and issue revised ones. That of itself will cost the taxpayers of Britain another £200 million. After all that, what we have not got from all the cost and chaos of the poll tax system is a single additional home help. We have not got a single extra police officer, not an extra teacher, not an extra road repair—and that is not even taking into account the fact that the Government inflicted the community charge but they stopped community care. There is nothing better in any of the vital services as a consequence of having this preposterously expensive and unjust system.