Business Rate Supplements Bill

My Lords, I, too, support the amendment of my noble friend Lord Jenkin of Roding. He played an invaluable role in Committee and on Report when he introduced amendments at timely instances that went to the heart of the issue. They improved the debate and the Bill as a result. This is another example of that. My noble friend has highlighted a real problem in the way in which the Bill was presented to the House, certainly in Committee. In response to a two-line amendment put forward in Committee for a ballot allowing BRS-BIDs offsetting to take place for properties, the Government then came up with a six-page Schedule 2 setting out the details about how that will work. That was not done in a sensitive way by giving the House time to consider it; it was rushed through at the last minute. The only option open to those who had concerns and simply wanted to put statements on the record was to table amendments at Third Reading. The only point I would like to make in addition to those made by my noble friend Lord Jenkin and the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, would be to impress upon the Minister the impact that the rating evaluation will have. We were talking about the difficulties and burdens already on the collecting bodies—the councils—that are administrating the business rate supplement as it comes forward, but the rating revaluation is under way next year and that will be an additional burden on those authorities. It will not only be a burden on the authorities: it will be a burden on the businesses that have to pay it. The rating revaluation that has been pushed through is testing the rateable value of properties between the years of 2005 and 2008. I am sure that every Member of the House will recognise that those were the years of boom under this Government and the current year is certainly one of bust, yet the strike point by which the revaluation thresholds will be put forward for next year, 2010, will be the high point of inflated property values and inflated rents. That is pertinent to the amendment because of the £50,000 threshold in rateable value. Due to that rate, we could potentially see the cohort of businesses that is caught within the group this year significantly expanding next year. There is an easy way for the Minister to ease at a stroke the burdens and costs on the councils, and on the businesses that are going under at an alarming rate. Some figures were mentioned in the other place showing that 120 small businesses are closing down every day, according to the Federation of Small Businesses, and that a principal cause of that is the rise in business rates—as they are now, that is, before the revaluation is even in place. This year, two-thirds of businesses are saying that they face a rise of 6 per cent or more, while 10 per cent say that they face a rise of over 20 per cent. These are huge burdens on business, and they place additional burdens at a difficult time upon the administering authorities. The result is that there will be fewer businesses around to pay the business rate supplement and the business improvement district levy, and there will be more administrative burdens on the councils that have to collect them. Surely that does not make sense. The most sensible thing to do would be to abandon the plans for the revaluation for the present or to give an undertaking to this House—would the Minister be prepared to do this?—that if the revaluation went through next year, taking account of the thresholds that have been mentioned, the £50,000 threshold that the Government have put in place for the Bill would be reviewed and increased. Will the Minister comment specifically on that question and take note of the concerns mentioned by me, my noble friend and the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee?