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Business Rate Supplements Bill

My Lords, I am delighted to support the amendments. I do not have a great deal to add to the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee. However, I will make a few points about easily understood explanations. The amendments take on a new significance in the light of Amendment 1, which has been passed, because we now hope to find that businesses will be asked their opinion on all of the schemes that are put forward. Therefore, they will need an easily understood explanation. The discussion in Committee was well informed, contained lots of ideas and was genuinely constructive in coming forward with proposals. The point was made that, in tough economic times, officials in government departments, and even officials in local authorities, may have the time to construct, read and digest the implications of a 100, 200 or 300-page document and prospectus, complete with various legal and contractual requirements and the financial statements that will be there alongside the details of the scheme. However, if you are a business person who is struggling to make ends meet and to get through very difficult times, you are unlikely to want to print off 300 pages and read through them. Therefore, the requirement to provide a succinct summary that communicates the essential elements of the proposal seems to us an eminently sensible idea which most people would support. When we discussed this in Committee, the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, gave as one of her arguments for not accepting the proposal the desire not to prescribe to local authorities how they should conduct this whole process of communicating with business rate supplement payers. However, Clause 5, headed "Prospectus", contains several statements about what should be contained in the prospectus and how it should be presented. It states that electronic copies should be provided on the website and that a levying authority should, ""make copies of the published prospectus available for inspection at its principal office at all reasonable times of the day"." That is quite a micro-level of stipulation as regards what should happen with the prospectus. Therefore, I do not think that the Government’s arguments as presented in Committee stand up to careful scrutiny. These are very sensible amendments. I should have thought that if the Government want to ensure that these business rate supplement schemes are successful, the best way to do so is to ensure that people have the right information in the right proportion which answers the questions about which they are concerned. I should have thought the Government would want to accept these amendments in a sense of enlightened self-interest rather than refuse them. They are perfectly reasonable amendments and I am very happy to support them.