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Rates (Capital Values, etc.) (Northern Ireland) Order 2006

I presume that that is a reply to the figures that I just gave for the rates. I make no argument about that. I suppose that, on average, house prices are somewhat lower than the average for England, even though there are enormous variations—I have seen houses priced at £1.5 million in parts of Belfast. We can combine that with the other figures that we had in the earlier debate for public expenditure per head. Incomes are lower on average, and electricity bills are higher on average—those are fair points—but the issue is about making a contribution to local services and giving councils some discretion. Raising local revenue is the point. We were able to get the extra revenue through the rates to fund local services because we were outside the Treasury area. I am not trying to make a double point and say that people are only paying half and having the life of O’Reilly—if I can put it that way—but we need a contribution for water and sewerage charges. That will be in some other order that I shall be dealing with. The vast majority of capital values will be created by the computer assisted mass appraisal system, or CAMAS—I recommend a presentation on it to colleagues back in Northern Ireland. It works quite successfully elsewhere, including North America; revaluation takes place every year. You never get in the mess that we are in now of fixing the value in time and not having had a revaluation 10 or 15 years later. I am not saying that we will do that but the mechanism is there. Visits to less than 1 per cent of dwellings should be needed, so there will be no great army of people involved. I suspect that, when people get their letters in June, we might actually get complainants saying, ““My house is worth more than this”” because it is up for sale. As I say, the value is that which applied on 1 January 2005, so it would be 18 months behind time. The argument goes both ways: some will say, ““My house is not worth that much; I should be paying less”” but others will say, ““My house is worth more than that””. Over a period, the value will be that at which the property can be sold on the open market to a willing buyer from a willing seller.