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Council Tax (New Valuation Lists for England) Bill

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her clear explanation, which is the one that we thought she would make. The amendment would prevent any changes being made to structure of the council tax system—that is to say to the proportion of council tax between bands, the values attributed to each band or the number of bands—without first compiling a new valuation list through a revaluation exercise. That is to ensure that reform of the council tax band structure will always be linked to a revaluation. I cannot see that major reform of the system of this nature would ever take place without a revaluation; it is self-evident that the two elements go together hand in glove, and we were clear about that during the passage of the Local Government Act 2003. That is not to say that the current legislation precludes such changes in isolation from revaluation, but I believe it to be unlikely, not least because of the practical problems that it would present.