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Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [Lords]

I very much agree with what my right hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr. Raynsford) said about the missing elements in our discussion of the Bill, including Lyons and several factors that go with that. His comments meshed closely with the thoughtful, as always, contribution by the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry) with regard to the point at which we decide where representation should fall in local government and how we marry the notion of participation, or direct government, with representation, which is the way in which participation and its antinomies can be determined. We cannot just have the white noise of participation determining what happens, through the internet or otherwise, without a representative process that sorts out who gets what, where, how and when, and who does the thinking about that. Equally, we cannot say that we wish to devolve power right down to the local level—that we will get rid of regional authorities and so on, and that everything will come back to local authorities—while maintaining an undifferentiated form of taxation that increasingly ends up as a flat tax. Without any ability to vary such a tax, particularly locally, it increasingly has to be determined from the centre, which necessitates making up bogus valuations in order to make any sense of how people are taxed in the first place. I understand that the Conservatives said in their green paper on local government that they would devolve power down to local level, and at the same time keep the crude version of that tax in place and freeze it for two years. Under that proposal, no one would have the opportunity to exercise any financial discretion as regards how to go about that devolution and exercise the representative government function locally. There is nothing more centralising than a tax system over which no one has any discretionary control at local level, and in which decisions on how money will be organised locally end up entirely in the hands of central Government. We are not wholly at that point yet, but if we do not do something about the issue over a period of time, we will be. We must recognise that if we are to maintain some form of council tax or similar system, it will require modernisation, uprating and revaluation to make it function. If we do not do so, we will surely have condemned our local government system. Whichever direction the rhetoric about localisation is pointing, we will in fact have secured a thoroughly centralised system with very little local discretion and variation.