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Business Rate Supplements Bill

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendments 4, 10, 14 and 38, standing in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Cathcart. The amendments highlight concern on this side of the House about the legislation full-stop. Our argument is that the legislation should have been restricted to London. It was designed and conceived as a mechanism for bridging the funding gap for Crossrail. Crossrail’s £15.9 billion of funding was calculated, in negotiation no doubt with the Treasury, to include a business rate supplement in the region of £3.5 billion. We on this side of the House and the Mayor of London, whom we are happy to support in his ambitions for the capital city, see Crossrail as a major infrastructure project which should have been commissioned far earlier and desperately needs to go ahead. It requires some additional support from businesses. It was subject to debate during the mayoral election, where it was a principal part of a manifesto commitment. This legislation should therefore have been wrapped in, isolated and linked totally to the Crossrail project, because to move out beyond it looks suspiciously like an additional tax. A number of areas of government funding used to deal with economic regeneration and, to an extent, still do. The local authority business growth initiative, for example, provided about £1 billion per year to improve and stimulate economic regeneration in the many of the areas in which it is claimed the business rate supplement is now needed. That £1 billion over the past three years has been reduced to just £150 million over the next two years. We are already seeing the invisible hand of the Treasury at work, because, on the one hand, the local authority business growth incentive scheme is being wound down by an amount close to £850 million while, on the other, we see, miraculously, the business rate supplement being ratcheted up and rolled out more widely to provide potential funding of up to £750 million. This is a great concern that we have: when this particular measure was considered and conceived, it was in a wholly different economic environment and climate to the one that we are now in. Now, businesses up and down the country are struggling for breath to keep afloat in very testing economic times indeed. The business rates that are already there—whether it is non-domestic rate revaluations, the increase of 5 per cent, albeit spread over two years, congestion charging, parking charges; all of these taxes—stealth taxes—which were levied by the Chancellor to raise revenue from businesses during the good times are now very much the ones which are sinking many businesses, including other iniquitous taxes, such as empty property rates. This is in the same genre as empty property rates. It is one of these initiatives which were conceived in times of economic boom—so the Chancellor and the Prime Minister would have us believe—and are now being levied in times of bust in this country. Therefore, a very strong case is represented in these amendments, which we wish to pursue. This is a piece of legislation which should always have been linked to a specific, major, vitally important infrastructure project in the capital city and should not be levied outside it. I beg to move.