House of Commons Hansard Debates for 12 Nov 1991

Mr. John McFall (Dumbarton) : I was a member of the Committee that discussed the Local Government Finance Bill in 1987 when 182 clauses were proposed by the Government. More than 200 Lords amendments were proposed, with the result that the final legislation was thoroughly bad--so bad that today each and every Member encounters problems with the poll tax in their surgeries. Will those problems be repeated with this legislation because of the guillotine? That is what Members from all parties are afraid of and that is the nub of the problem which the Leader of the House should resolve.

Mr. MacGregor : The hon. Gentleman should address the point that I made earlier : if he wants the council tax to be in place in April 1993, it is essential to follow the sort of timetable that we are suggesting.

I should like to make a point that I have proposed as a personal point of view to the Select Committee on Sittings of the House chaired by my right hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Mr. Jopling). It seems that the best use of precious parliamentary time is to ensure that the whole of a Bill of such importance is subject to adequate discussion and scrutiny and the timetable motion allows for precisely that. It will be for the Standing Committee to determine how long it spends on the various parts of the Bill. The timetable motion establishes a framework designed to guarantee that the

Column 1014

whole Bill is given adequate discussion in Committee, despite any attempts to delay and filibuster on particular clauses.

The times specified in the motion for when the knives fall on various groups of clauses merely determine when the Questions are put in Committee. If the Committee so wishes, there is nothing to stop it carrying on after that point on the next group of clauses, thus increasing the time available overall for discussion.

Mr. Allen McKay (Barnsley, West and Penistone) : The right hon. Gentleman is missing an important point about Committees. It is all very well cramming all the hours in Committee into one week, but Oppositions depend on outside bodies--local authorities, local authority treasurers and local council leaders--to give them information about Bills. There will not be enough time for that with this Bill and that is a denial of democracy.

Mr. MacGregor : I understand that, but there has been prolonged consultation on these proposals and the Bill has been available for a considerable number of days.

We have to strike a balance between parliamentary consideration, which will take several months, and the need to get the council tax into operation by April 1993

Mr. David Blunkett (Sheffield, Brightside) : Given that the Committee will meet three days a week, starting at 10.30 am and breaking in the afternoon, does the right hon. Gentleman really believe that discussion after midnight is the right way to apply detailed scrutiny to legislation of this sort? We all know about the difficulties of debating at that time of night. Would not a debate held so late at night be more about mice and pumpkins than about the legislative framework for a sensible, democratic Parliament such as ours?

Mr. MacGregor : I well recall debating Finance Bills introduced by the last Labour Government well after midnight in Committee. I repeat : we must endeavour to strike the right balance between a reasonable amount of time for parliamentary consideration and getting Royal Assent in time to introduce the council tax--

Mr. John Maxton (Glasgow, Cathcart) : One danger of the timetable motion is that, because the Bill has not been thought through properly by the Government, they will use the Committee stage to table large numbers of their own amendments to try to improve the Bill. The Chair will then give those amendments precedence over Opposition amendments. So the bulk of the time will be taken up with trying to clear up the mess that the Government have created.

Mr. MacGregor : I can only repeat that we must strike a balance between parliamentary consideration and putting the council tax in place. I assure the hon. Gentleman that the Bill has been thoroughly thought through.

A timetable motion along these lines enhances the consideration of any Bill. That is why in my memorandum to the Select Committee on Sittings of the House I made clear my view that a much greater use of timetabling, as recommended by the Procedure Committee--the Chairman of that Committee is in his place this evening--would be an important improvement in the effectiveness of our procedures.

Column 1015

If the Labour party opposes this motion, it can only be for one of three reasons. Perhaps Opposition Members fear the amount of time that we shall provide to expose the bankruptcy of their policies on local government finance ; or perhaps they wish to deny the House enough time to debate the Bill in a structured way ; or perhaps they wish to prevent the council tax from being properly prepared and implemented by 1993. That is why it is right to present the motion and to ask my right hon. and hon. Friends to support it.

The details of the motion are self-explanatory, but I should like to repeat one important point. As I have already made clear, nothing in the motion prevents the Committee from sitting after the guillotine falls in order to spend extra time on the clauses in what could be described as the next compartment. Ministers would obviously reflect the views of the Committee as a whole in deciding when to move the adjournment. I assure the House that, if it wishes, the Committee can sit much later into the night. Thus the total number of hours provided by the motion is very much a minimum. The times at which the guillotine falls have been agreed following discussions, but I am sure that none of us would wish to lay down to the Committee exactly how much time it must take.

The proposals in the motion provide adequate time for debate to ensure that the whole of this vital Bill is subjected to proper parliamentary scrutiny. We must ensure the minimum amount of time for the regulations to be promulgated, for guidance to be given to local authorities and for them to make the detailed preparations for the introduction of the council tax. If that is not done, the tax will not be in place by April 1993, which is what most hon. Members want and what we should like. I commend the motion to the House. 11.11 pm

Dr. John Cunningham (Copeland) : The Leader of the House started his speech with an error and made a totally unconvincing case for the motion. He started by saying that the Bill has already had three days of debate. Presumably he was counting a day of the debate on the Gracious Speech which took place before the Bill had been published. He cannot say that the House had a day's debate on a Bill that it had not seen.

Mr. MacGregor : I am afraid that, uncharacteristically, the hon. Gentleman started with an error himself. I did not make an error. The Bill was published on the Friday before the debate on the Gracious Speech.

Dr. Cunningham : The right hon. Gentleman went on to say that he was following normal procedures. The motion owes everything to the Government's failed election strategy and nothing to the proper scrutiny of legislation that will affect every home in the land. Once again the Government are setting unenviable records with their summary attitude to important legislation. We have seen and heard it all before. For a decade the Government have offered local taxpayers salvation. First, there were the targets and penalties set by the Secretary of State for the Environment when he formerly held that office. Local Government Finance Bills came thick and fast throughout the 1980s and guillotines fell upon them with monotonous regularity. Targets and penalties, rate capping, retrospective legislation and the poll tax were all guillotined and railroaded through the

Column 1016

House in the so-called interests of local taxpayers. They were all said to be the final solution to the problems of more accountability and a fairer deal for ratepayers. Here we are again with the latest Tory tax.

The Conservative justification for those actions makes hilarious reading. Hansard is replete with justifications for the need for haste and change and the reason why the latest piece of Conservative manic legislation would put everything right. It never did. The consequences for local taxpayers, local services, local authority jobs and, of course, for local government in general are not funny. It was all incoherent opportunism then and it is all incoherent opportunism now, but it is again about to be given the force of law. The Government still lack any coherent philosophy on local government, or any principles on which to base their approach to local government in Britain. The poll tax--their flagship--is now to be ignominiously scrapped, but not for at least one more year. We have heard the same hollow arguments and transparent claims paraded by the Leader of the House and his right hon. and hon. Friends--a fairer system ; it must be guillotined ; it must be on the statute book as soon as possible. No one believes any of this any more. We have had too many bitter experiences. This time, the Tory imperative is not to save the taxpayer but--a vain attempt--to save their political skins.

There were three lines about the poll tax in the Tory manifesto at the last general election. They cost the people of Britain £15 billion--£5 billion a line. When the Bill to introduce the poll tax was guillotined into law, the Secretary of State for Energy, who was then Leader of the House, the right hon. Member for Colchester, South and Maldon (Mr. Wakeham), praised it. He said :

"Our proposed community charge will introduce the accountability which is currently lacking The Bill will achieve those objectives through the replacement of domestic rates by a fairer community charge, the introduction of a simpler and more stable system". Who believes that any more? He continued :

"Local electors and local businesses are crying out for a change from an unfair system of local revenue raising to a more equitable one that will increase local government accountability and strengthen local democracy."-- [ Official Report, 22 February 1988 ; Vol. 128, c. 28-32.]

All that is to be thrown out of the window now. The Minister for Local Government and Inner Cities actually said at the Tory party conference that the poll tax would be a vote winner. If it is so wonderful, why the headlong rush to get rid of it?

When he was Leader of the House, the right hon. Member for Colchester, South and Maldon adduced in support of the guillotine the fact that the Conservatives had a mandate for the poll tax. This is the first time that I can recall--it is probably a constitutional and historical first--a Government using a guillotine not to get their manifesto commitments in but to get their manifesto commitments out. That is what the Leader of the House is asking the House to do. It is instructive to reflect on how the House treated the poll tax Bill or, more fairly, the way that the Government treated it. On Second Reading, it had 131 clauses and 12 schedules. By the time that it came out of Committee, because of huge amendments and additions, it had 164 clauses and 16 schedules. It then went to another place, where it stayed for quite some time, and came back with

Column 1017

417 new amendments on 66 pages. They too were railroaded through the House of Commons in a few short hours.

The Leader of the House and his right hon. and hon. Friends no longer have any credibility on these matters, and they have the brass neck to come to the House and ask us to put up with it all again. Several times the Leader of the House spoke of following normal procedures when he is recommending abnormal procedures.

Mr. Budgen : Is it not plain that the Leader of the House was saying that he hoped to have the minimum possible period between the end of the Committee stage and Report? That may be a legitimate way to deal with a non -controversial Bill that does not require a great deal of consultation, but this is a major constitutional Bill on which we want the responses not only of officers in local government but of locally elected people and the population generally. There ought to be not a bare minimum but a proper period of national consultation.

Dr. Cunningham : The hon. Gentleman is right, and I know that in truth the Leader of the House shares his view. Recently the right hon. Gentleman attended a sitting of the Select Committee on Sittings of the House, which is chaired by the right hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Mr. Jopling). In evidence, he said : "The Opposition must have adequate opportunity to oppose, and its legitimate rights must be sustained."

That is what the right hon. Gentleman said only a few days ago. Yet here he is flattening at one fell swoop by means of a guillotine motion the Opposition's right to oppose. The right hon. Gentleman cannot face both ways, one way in the Chamber and in an entirely different way when giving evidence to the right hon. Member for Westmorland Lonsdale and others. As my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley, West and Penistone (Mr. McKay) said, there will not be adequate time and opportunity for Government Back- Bench Members to obtain briefing on amendments, let alone Opposition Members. There has been talk of normal procedures. As the proposed Committee will sit on three consecutive days each week and sometimes, on the admission of the Leader of the House, late into the night, will he guarantee that Committee Hansards will be available in the normal way for Committee members to scrutinise what Ministers have said in debates that may not have finished, or in debates that may be germane to subsequent debates and amendments ? Will the right hon. Gentleman give us the assurance that the reports will be available ? Would he like to give us that assurance now ? Come on ! The answer is no answer at all. That is the response of a Minister who a few moments ago was telling the House that normal procedures would be followed. We know that no precedent for the procedures that we are discussing has ever been proposed before by any Government on any Bill, not even on a tuppenny-ha'penny Bill of no consequence let alone a Bill of the magnitude and significance that we are discussing.

The Government's proposals would be easy to understand if they had a reasonable record on these matters, but I have made clear briefly that their record is abysmal. The hon. Member for Enfield and Southgate (Mr. Portillo) and others have abandoned their commitment--this certainly goes for the Under-Secretary

Column 1018

of State for Wales, the hon. Member for Pembroke (Mr. Bennett) and most Conservative Members--to the poll tax. All of them--I say that unless a Conservative Member wants to intervene to say that he opposed it--marched through the Government Lobby in support of it, and did so on many occasions. They supported also guillotine motions that related to it. They seem to have changed their tune somewhat tonight.

The poll tax legislation was guillotined in and it will be guillotined out, but it will not entirely disappear until we have a Labour Government after the next general election.

We face a familiar scene but one that has a new twist. There is to be unprecedented forcing of legislation through the House. It is clear that when the political future of Tory Members is at stake they care little about the proper scrutiny of tax proposals and the expenditure of public money.

The poll tax Bill and the new Tory tax Bill bear some comparison. The earlier measure had 131 clauses and 12 schedules when it began its tortuous journey through the House. The Bill that is before us has 117 clauses and 14 schedules. The previous measure was in Committee for 72 hours before it was guillotined. Unlike that which the Leader of the House implied, there was no question of any filibuster. I led the opposition to it on behalf of the Labour party and, far from filibustering, I recall that the Government tabled more amendments in Committee than the Opposition. We were anxious to proceed to the important parts of the Bill. In total, that Bill had 136 hours in Committee. For a Bill of not dissimilar length and importance, the Leader of the House is suggesting 80 to 100 hours for scrutiny, yet he has the nerve to say that he is proposing normal procedures. In fact, he is breaking with all precedent, and he knows it.

This guillotine motion is symptomatic of a Government who have come to treat the House of Commons, and, for that matter, the British people, with total contempt in their approach to local government finance. It is a Government who cannot be trusted with the reform of local government finance, just as they cannot be trusted with the future of the national health service, our children's education or the handling of the economy.

The timetable for the council tax Bill has been determined by one criterion above all others--the panic-stricken attempt by the Prime Minister to hang on to office, with a discredited group of Ministers hanging on to his coat tails. That is the real reason why we are here tonight. The motion makes a mockery of the procedures of the House and its proper role in the scrutiny of Bills. We should not be surprised by the way the Government are acting in forcing through yet another of their ill-conceived pieces of local government legislation, because that has been the hallmark of their time in office. Why is the House being asked to accept the unprecedented step of having a Standing Committee for a major Bill that sits on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays and, from what the Leader of the House implied, could be in almost continuous session?

The Prime Minister should seriously consider the proposal of the Association of Metropolitan Authorities, which is rightly concerned that poll tax collection will become even more difficult in coming months because of the mess and confusion that the Government have created. The AMA has suggested a national advertising campaign drawing the public's attention to their liability to pay the poll tax, which is not yet even abolished. There could even

Column 1019

be a large poster sited across the road from 10 Downing street for the Prime Minister's benefit. After all, the Government have always been more than ready to spend millions and millions of pounds of taxpayers' money on lavish advertising campaigns to promote other aspects of Government policy, so why should not they do so on this occasion?

The unpalatable fact remains for us all that every person who gets a poll tax bill in this financial year will find one dropping on his doormat next financial year as well. No one is in any doubt about where the responsibility lies for that. In spite of the bluster of the Leader of the House, my hon. Friend the Member for Dagenham (Mr. Gould) and others have repeatedly offered to co-operate, as we did in the last Session of Parliament, on Bills to abolish the poll tax immediately. The delay in abolishing that piece of Tory folly is entirely due to the Government's unwillingness to co-operate in getting rid of it as quickly as possible.

Try as the Government might, fiddle with the evidence as they might, the Government will not escape, first, the responsibility for poll tax itself, and, secondly, their unenviable record in railroading rotten legislation through the House. For those reasons, we shall certainly oppose the motion.

11.28 pm

Sir Geoffrey Finsberg (Hampstead and Highgate) : The hon. Member for Copeland (Dr. Cunningham) enjoyed making that speech and the House enjoyed some of his remarks. The trouble is that many of them were carbon copies of speeches made from that Bench over the past 20 years.

I and many hon. Members in the House tonight have listened to a vast number of guillotine debates. They are predictable. I have not participated in one before, but I thought that it was perhaps worth making a contribution on this occasion, for a variety of reasons-- [Interruption.] If my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Budgen) bothered to listen, he would discover why I am making this speech. I shall listen to his speech without the discourtesy of interrupting him.

What clearly emerges is that the Government want the Bill to go through. Every Government wants its legislation to go through. Every Opposition express their anger at the contempt with which the House is being treated and the contempt with which local government is being treated and always accuse the Government of flagrantly abusing the processes of democracy.

It is easy to make the sort of speech that the hon. Member for Copeland made. He merely has to look back at speeches made by hon. Members from both sides of the Chamber during the past 20 years, changing the quotations, the odd word and the title of the Bill. In that way he can make his speech without any preparation. He adapts the words of his predecessors and the Government spokesman does the same. The tragedy is that none of the speeches will alter a single vote when it comes to the Division.

Mr. Budgen : Does my hon. Friend appreciate that in the whole of the period between 1945 and 1951, when the House was considering the most major social changes, there were only three guillotine motions, and that in 1988 there were 13? Does not my hon. Friend think that at the

Column 1020

very least he should address the allegation that the Government have got into the habit of bashing their legislation through under the guillotine?

Sir Geoffrey Finsberg : Some of us were elected to carry through legislation detailed in election addresses, and I propose to continue to do that. As for the other point that my hon. Friend made, that is such a hoary chestnut that it has been answered over and over again and I do not propose to waste the time of the House repeating ad nauseam the arguments which, if he had been present, he would have heard on previous occasions.

The purpose of the motion is, as my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House said, to give enough time to discuss each clause sensibly. Let me now say why I decided to speak in the debate. My first experience of participating in a guillotined debate was when I was a junior Minister with responsibility for housing in 1979-80 when we put through the right-to-buy legislation. We sat afternoon and night, ploughing on, wasting time on early clauses until the macho characteristics of the Opposition had been sufficiently satisfied and the Government business managers had been sufficiently satisfied to table a guillotine motion. The trouble was that much of the argument was useless because it was addressed to unimportant clauses and many of the important clauses were not properly dealt with. That was not the way to proceed.

Timetable motions always lead the Opposition to claim that not enough time has been given. Let me draw the attention of the House to the report of the Select Committee on Procedure which was published on 23 April 1985. On page 25, it says :

"Timetables on controversial bills"--

no one would argue that this is not a controversial bill "should be introduced much earlier than at present. To this end there should be a Legislative Business Committee of thirteen Members appointed by the Committee of Selection".

It goes on to say that that Committee

"should consider all Government bills committed to a Standing Committee. If it considers that a Bill is likely to require more than twenty-five hours in standing committee"

I guess that everyone thinks that--

"the LBC should recommend a maximum number of hours for consideration of the Bill by the standing committee."

My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House has recommended a minimum, not a maximum, number of hours. It goes on to say : "Such recommendations should be implemented without debate." That report was carried by eight votes to one with the support of Labour, Liberal and Conservative Members.

That is the point that should be addressed. I am speaking of the considered view of the Procedure Committee, not some decision made by a fly-by-night business managers' Committee. The Procedure Committee is a very distinguished body.

Mr. Wilkinson : No one is casting aspersions on the Procedure Committee, or disputing its merits ; I am sure that it was both distinguished and wise. None the less, we must conduct our affairs according to the procedures that are currently in place.

Furthermore--if we are to deal with hypothetical examples--it could equally be said that a pre-legislative Select Committee should be established to take evidence from experts. My hon. Friend's remarks derive from a recommendation based on the proposition that a

Column 1021

pre-legislative Committee should decide how much time should be allocated. No such consensus is involved in our procedure, however ; we must decide on the merits of the motion that we are debating.

Sir Geoffrey Finsberg : The Leader of the House has read the Procedure Committee's report, and has decided that this is how we should proceed. I remind the House that among the members of that Committee was the right hon. J. Enoch Powell, who gave his approval--and there was no stauncher defender of the rights of Parliament. My hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton (Mr. Maxwell-Hyslop) is another great expert on these matters. Such people will not be bludgeoned into presenting foolish proposals.

Mr. Allen McKay (Barnsley, West and Penistone) : The hon. Gentleman misses the vital point that the Select Committee is composed of Members of all parties. This pig's ear of a motion has been decided by hon. Members on only one side of the House--perhaps by only one or two people. That is a negation of our responsibility to decide, as a House, what the House should do. It should not be a case of the Secretary of State's deciding what the Opposition should do. It is one thing for a special Committee, perhaps a Select Committee, to make a judgment ; it is another for a motion such as this to be rammed down our throats.

Sir Geoffrey Finsberg : The hon. Gentleman puts his case very reasonably, but I cannot agree. If the Procedure Committee, having received masses of evidence, weighed that evidence and reached a conclusion with the support of all parties in the House, says that a maximum number of hours should be laid down, and my right hon. Friend proposes a minimum number, it is clear that he has gone beyond what the Committee proposed. I think that that is more than reasonable.

Mr. Martin Flannery (Sheffield, Hillsborough) : The hon. Gentleman has omitted a vital point. He has not told us what happened when the House received the report from that--as he described it--distinguished Committee. What did the House do about it?

Sir Geoffrey Finsberg : Alas, like so many Select Committee reports, it was not adopted. Long ago, I served on that Committee. It produces extremely good reports, but, unfortunately, they are not always given debating time, and they are not always accepted. I hope that, when the House accepts the motion later tonight, a precedent will be set.

Let me be frank. I should like all legislation to be timetabled. That was hinted at in a review of legislation presented a long time ago by Sir David Renton, which was warmly supported.

Mr. Budgen : Will my hon. Friend give way?

Sir Geoffrey Finsberg : I promise that I shall do so when I finish this passage ; I would not dream of not giving way to my hon. Friend.

There is no point in the House deciding that it will examine the hours during which it sits and the conditions in which it works if it does not intend to reform the structure of legislation. That is why I hope that the passing of the motion will create a precedent. It will affect both

Column 1022

sides of the House. Governments become the Opposition and the Opposition become the Government. [ Hon. Members :-- "Hear, Hear."] Of course. I am looking ahead to the year 2000. On this occasion, though, I am trying not to be too partisan ; it is too important an issue. We must try to ensure that the House is given sufficient time to consider legislation so that all the clauses can be considered properly.

Mr. Budgen : Does my hon. Friend agree that respect for the authority of the law arises not because the Government have bashed legislation through but because that legislation has been subjected to the full procedure then in force, so that by the time it has been considered each and every one of us can be said to have given our consent to it? The danger when dealing with legislation of this sort, which has been the subject of contempt and non-collection, is that those who pay reluctantly may feel that the legislation that comes out of this truncated procedure has not been accorded the proper majesty of the procedure and that in some way it can be treated with contempt, as though it were lesser law.

Sir Geoffrey Finsberg : It is a pity that my hon. Friend prejudices his case by using the words "bashed through." They are not words that his predecessor would have used. Moreover, I do not believe that what he has said is relevant to the debate. The mere fact of having three times the amount of time to consider the legislation would not necessarily make it any better. We might hear more speeches from my hon. Friend, but the legislation would not necessarily be improved in any way. Therefore, the House would be well advised to pass the motion. We know from the start exactly when each clause will be given time and we shall be able to decide how much time we want to spend on individual clauses.

I have tried to get away from the usual quoting of five guillotines in one night and X number of guillotines in 1945. That is not the point. The point is whether this is the way to space out the legislation, giving sufficient time for consideration of each clause. What we do not want to do, as so often happens, is to find that 10, 20 or 30 clauses have to go through on the nod because the knife has come down and that we have to leave it to the other place to do our work for us. By this means we shall do our work in a more efficient way than we have done up to now.

11.42 pm

Mr. David Bellotti (Eastbourne) : At the beginning of the speech of the hon. Member for Hampstead and Highgate (Sir G. Finsberg), I thought that the Government had written his script, but as he proceeded I realised that even the Government could not have written it for him.

After listening to the debate, it seems to me that the Government are in a very large hole which they continue to dig. There has been no consultation on the timetable with the Opposition parties. They may have wished to suggest how the Government should proceed. No Opposition Member likes the council tax, but we dislike the poll tax, too, and we are only too willing to help the Government get rid of it at the very first opportunity. However, having introduced the poll tax and inflicted such suffering on the people of this country, the Government

Column 1023

are only too pleased to grab at the first thing they see in an effort to get themselves off the poll tax hook as quickly as possible.

The proposed timetable is absolutely crazy for the size of the task. Local government finance is one of the most complex issues that the House will ever have to debate. Although we shall have 75 hours plus--depending on the time that some of the sittings finish--the proceedings will have to be concluded in just two weeks and two days. There will be little time for reflection between one Committee sitting and the next. There will be little time to consider something that is very important, such as whether a particular clause that was considered at the previous sitting will have an effect on following clauses.

Why are the Government rushing the Bill through in such a way? If the council tax has merit, surely they will want to persuade hon. Members and the general public that it is worth looking forward to. But no, the reverse is true. This must be a deliberate act by the Government because they do not want people outside to realise what the tax will be like for them.

Conservative Back-Benchers have shown their dislike for the council tax in the debate on Second Reading. If they showed such dislike at that stage, clearly there will be considerable disputes in Committee and even more disagreement when the general public learn about the tax. That is why the Government have to rush the Bill through before too many people realise what the tax will be like.

The rush also displays the Government's attitude towards local government. I was first elected to a district council in 1979--a very significant year. Every year since then the Government have attacked what that local authority, on which I sat for 12 years, has tried to do, whether it be the delivery of services, or raising the resources to pay for them. The Government have centralised control and in some cases they have inflicted a vindictiveness which is not merely unwelcome but which stops the local authorities providing some of those services.

Central Government should be working in partnership with local government. The Bill should be discussed until local government reaches the consensus that it also believes that local taxation is the right method to pay for the services that they and not the House have to deliver.

When one considers the costs that the Government are prepared to allocate to set up the council tax, all is revealed. They will meet only three quarters of the cost, in the same year that local government will continue to lose millions of pounds of poll tax which they cannot collect as a result of action by the same Government. Not only will millions of pounds be lost, but millions of people will lose out under the council tax because the charges will be greater for them than they were under the poll tax.

The Government have already got many of their sums wrong. They have over- estimated the value of properties and, as a result, the tax will go up. The Government still have not answered some questions to the satisfaction of the House--including some Conservative as well as Opposition Members. For example, if they are going to exempt the majority of students and those on income support from 1993, cannot they exempt everyone from the 20 per cent. of the poll tax that they have to pay from 1992? That could be provided for in a clause in the Bill. We could pass it with the timetabled Bill and we could stop some of

Column 1024

the suffering. A number of right hon. and hon. Friends have suggested that during the past two days of debate, but we have heard nothing from the Government about it.

It will be necessary carefully to study some of the clauses in the 163 pages of the Bill. The Government believe that students will be exempt, but there is a grey area. What happens if some students live in a property with some working adults? The Government have not answered that question, so we shall need to debate it and table amendments.

The Minister for Local Government and Inner Cities (Mr. Michael Portillo) : I provided the answers

Mr. Bellotti : I was here for the winding-up speeches and I am not satisfied with the answers. We shall have to consider the matter carefully in Committee and there may be a case for some amendments. Another grey area is the right of entry to property. It cannot be right that the House could pass a law that would permit estate agents to enter homes at 24 hours' notice to ascertain what they are like inside. That right is in the Bill. There need to be more safeguards and the 24 hours' notice needs to be extended. Is it right that banks, building societies and other institutions should be required, with 21 days' notice, to give information about valuation of properties? The contract between an individual and a bank or building society will be deviated from because the Government could require that information to be given to a valuation officer. Many aspects of the Bill will require serious consideration in Committee and the timetable motion does not provide the time necessary.

Dr. Norman A Godman (Greenock and Port Glasgow) : Does not the timetable motion simply make plain the Government's contempt for this place? At a moment when there is growing uncertainty about the power of this place vis-a -vis central institutions of the European Community, the Government make matters worse by treating the House so disgracefully.

Mr. Bellotti : The hon. Gentleman makes a telling point. The Government want to centralise decision-making and keep power here at Westminster. They do not want local authorities to have powers to raise funds or to deliver services. That is the crux of the Bill and all the local government legislation that the Government have introduced since 1979.

There is another reason why the motion is so necessary and it becomes clear when one looks at how the council tax will affect individuals. I shall give one example, although there are dozens. Hon. Members will understand why I choose West Oxfordshire. Under the poll tax two people there pay £481, but under the council tax that sum will increase to over £500. In the south-east, in particular in Eastbourne and Sussex, there are dozens of such examples. The majority of people will be worse off under the council tax. Obviously, the Government are trying to rush the Bill through Parliament as quickly as they can, hoping to attract as little attention as possible, and to get the general election over with in the hope of being returned. They are in for a shock. People are waking up. After the poll tax fiasco, they will look carefully at the council tax. They will not allow it to pass as they did the poll tax.

The Government had other opportunities that they could have taken, but they turned their face against them.

Column 1025

As an hon. Member said earlier, this is another missed opportunity for local government finance. The Government made great play of accountability, but local government can be made accountable in other ways--not to the House, but to the people who elect them to deliver services. There should be and is no need to cap a local authority. One could introduce a fair voting system. Whatever system we have, councillors should be accountable to their local electorate, not to this place.

I am disappointed that the Government have not yet seriously considered the one tax that has been proved to work in other European countries and the north Americas, and that is a local income tax. No one can dispute that it is easy to collect. It is cheap to administer--certainly cheaper than the rates, the poll tax or the council tax. We will not have an opportunity to debate that in Committee, so it is right to draw attention to it now. Above all, to use a phrase which the Government, Opposition and general public have used many times, a local income tax is certainly related to the ability to pay. It, too, could be in place by April 1993--the exact timetable that the Government have for the council tax.

The Leader of the House began by saying that the proposals were carefully thought through. I cannot understand how he can stand at the Dispatch Box and say that when, clearly, they have been rushed. He said that the proposals were balanced, but they are unfair. People will find it an unfair tax. The proposals are certainly not well thought out. The Leader of the House said that they were. Does that mean that there will be no Government amendments in Committee? That would be interesting.

The Bill and the guillotine come from a Government who are on their last legs. With the poll tax the Government shot themselves in the stomach. With the council tax they will shoot themselves in the head.

11.54 pm

Next Section

Home Page