Council Tax Valuation Bands Bill [HL]

Lord Wasserman Excerpts

Friday 11th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wasserman (Con)]

My Lords, I support the Motion proposed by my noble friend Lord Marlesford that the Bill be read a second time. As it is a very short Bill, I propose to keep my comments very short, too. As my noble friend Lord Brooke has already pointed out, my noble friend Lord Marlesford has a well-deserved reputation for identifying bits of our administrative arrangements which are in need of updating, either to take account of changed economic and social circumstances or new technology, or simply because the world has moved on and we look at things in a different way. Our statute books contain several examples of what I call Marlesford modifications, aimed at making our bureaucracy more cost-effective and our society fairer. This Bill is his latest contribution to this campaign.

Although it carries the innocuous and, dare I say it, rather tedious title of Council Tax Valuation Bands Bill, which sounds very much like something out of a “Monty Python” sketch, it is in fact a very ingenious Bill with wide-ranging implications. As the noble Lord, Lord Desai, pointed out, it is also very radical because it proposes that those who own the most expensive properties should pay not three times more in council tax than those who live in the least expensive, as is now the case, but 42 times as much.

Is 42 the right number? This is clearly a matter of opinion. I am not going to try to defend it or any other set of ratios set out in Clause 1(3). Debates about numbers and ratios are best left for Committee, when the real experts in the intricacies of council tax collection—of whom I am definitely not one—will no doubt have plenty to say. However, I welcome the progressive nature of the Bill’s proposals, particularly at the higher ends of the scale, and believe that they are much more in keeping with the spirit of the times than our present arrangements, whereby those at the top pay only three times as much as those at the bottom. Those arrangements are simply no longer defensible in a world where fairness has become a basic principle across the whole political spectrum.

The Bill is concerned with more than simply increasing the progressivity of the council tax system so as to achieve greater fairness. It makes two other ingenious, important and very sensible proposals. The first is that council tax bands should reflect more accurately the actual values of the properties being taxed. As has already been pointed out several times this morning, the present bands were set as at 1 April 1991, which is almost 25 years ago, when a property worth more than £320,000—the beginning of the top band—was something to behold. I noticed the other day that there is a property for sale in Smith Square, which is very convenient for Members of your Lordships’ House. It is on the market now for £25 million, although I will admit that it contains a gym, a jacuzzi and a lift. Is it sensible that that property should be lumped in the present band H, with all other properties valued at more than £320,000? Is it fair that the purchaser of this property should pay no more than three times as much in council tax as someone who owns a property at the very bottom of the scale?

It seems obvious that the property values used to assess council tax should reflect the situation in the real world. Here is where the Bill’s third ingenious and sensible proposal comes in. The main argument against revaluing all properties in England for council tax purposes is one of cost. In our so-called age of austerity this is indeed a powerful argument but, as has been pointed out several times already, the Bill deals with this objection by proposing that the new property values used for assessing council tax should be taken from the land register—that is, from the list of actual property transactions recorded under the Land Registration Act 2002, rather than being produced as the result of a massive revaluation of the kind completed 25 years ago. I have no doubt that those who know much more about this subject than me will tell us in Committee why this proposal is fraught with administrative and technical difficulties—but that is what Committee is for. For these reasons, I urge your Lordships to give the Bill a Second Reading.