---

Rates (Amendment) (Northern Ireland) Order 2006

I shall not repeat my opening remarks, but shall pick up the main thrust of my argument. We agree with the Government that the rating system urgently needs to be overhauled, be we disagree strongly in a number of areas about the way in which they have done it. What concerns me most is the way in which this matter has been used. There is no hurry to get this rating order through. The Minister told me that the rating review is revenue neutral, and I believe it will be in year one. However, after that, it will not be, and no one can kid me that it will. If the review is revenue neutral, there is no hurry. No money will be wasted or lost. We all believe and hope that devolution will return to Northern Ireland, and we are supporting the Government as part of the team to bring that about. This business was started by the Assembly, so why the rush? Why not let it finish it in the way that it wants to do it now? Why threaten it by saying that if this is done in the Assembly there can be a cap, but if it is not, there will not be one? Getting this serious business about the lives of people in Northern Ireland mixed up with the St Andrews agreement, peace agreements and other political stuff is wrong. It may be said that I am naïve, but I do not think it is the right way to go about it. This matter has been taken out of context and used wrongly. It has created a certain amount of heat and made the Secretary of State seem to be a bully. I do know whether he is, but it is not a good way to allow him to be seen. There should be a cap of some sort, but I am not going to suggest where it should be. The valuation process has not been taken into account. The Minister said that very few people owned their own houses 20 years ago, but now many do. However, most people who own their own houses—over 60 per cent of them, at least—probably bought them 20 or more years ago. There is not a big, mobile market. There is a market for new houses, which are bought by successful entrepreneurs, their families or first-time buyers. There is already a huge problem for first-time buyers, which is common to England and Wales, and this system will not help them, but will make their position considerably more difficult. That is not right. I apologise to the Committee for not declaring an interest in this matter; I live in Northern Ireland and will be paying rates under the new system. People on pensions who are living in their family home after their family has gone off will not have any money to pay the rates. They could well be living in a nice four-bedroom house in a nice area, but they are not wealthy. Their house is probably worth a lot of money, perhaps £500,000 or more, but unless they sell it, they do not have £500,000 in the bank or even £100,000 to cover the rates. That is extremely unfair. The same can be said about young families or about farming families throughout the country who live in nice places in small- or medium-sized farmhouses. Anyone who, like the Minister, has had anything to do with the farming industry anywhere—let alone in Northern Ireland—knows that people can do no more than make a wage as a farmer. It is a wonderful way of life for those who like it, but all they can do is earn a wage. If the value of their property is raised to something that an entrepreneur might payto have a nice place around him—£350,000 or £500,000—the farmer living in it does not have the means to meet the rate increase that he will face. There is a series of issues in that area that I am unhappy with. I am unhappy also about the business of being deemed to have been unreasonable or to have failed to give reasonable assistance to people valuing the house, for which one can be fined £1,000. Who will decide whether someone has been unreasonable? I read the order to mean that people will be taken to court and given a criminal record because they happen to have an argument on the backdoor step with an official from a government department. I find that pretty heavy-handed. There is also the business of flying overhouses, particularly country houses, to take aerial photographs. We live in a world where crime is still going up. Terrorism may be going down, but crime is going up. The smart guys will get their hands on those photographs to study the ways in to the house. They can then send a bogus surveyor to look at the house and get the information from him. It is just wide open. I do not see the sense in it. It is criminally wrong for the Government to go into that detail. This order needs to be radically amended to deal with all sorts of loopholes, many of which I have not mentioned. My party—I am speaking from the Dispatch Box and not for myself—finds this order deeply disturbing in many ways. This issue should never have been involved in the St Andrews process. Consent is not won by threatening people that, if they do not comply, the tax on the roof over their heads will be too high. The policy should have been—and should still be—left to the elected representatives of Northern Ireland to determine and, in the absence of a devolved Assembly, it should have been afforded the full scrutiny of the normal Bill process. I heard what the Minister said, but from the point of view of the whole country, Northern Ireland should not be bullied into being the test bed for a policy that the Government do not have the courage to try out first in England or Scotland. This order is a grim warning about where the Government are heading. This party cannot support this order. We ask the Government to withdraw it. If they do not, we shall seek a means when it returns to the Floor of the House to give the House an opportunity to cast its verdict on the deplorable policy and grubby tactics involved in it.