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Business Rate Supplements Bill

My Lords, I shall also speak to Amendments 23 and 24. Amendment 22 revisits Clause 6(5), because I believe consultation is important and Clause 6(5) does not in my reading actually require it. It says that, ""a levying authority must ... think whether it would be appropriate to consult persons who the authority thinks might become liable";" in other words, it must think whether consultation would be appropriate. At Grand Committee, the debate turned on the difficulty of identifying those who may be above or below the threshold—in other words, who might become liable—which was not the point of the amendment. Thinking whether it is appropriate to consult is not the same as thinking who might become liable. Our amendment—this is the crucial point—applies the term "appropriate" to ratepayers, whom it would be appropriate to consult, not to consultation. The consultation itself would be required. I hope that that explanation is clearer than we managed to achieve at the last stage. Amendment 23 would require the levying authority to publish the result of the consultation, once it had been conducted. Oddly, this is where even the best local authorities slip up too often. My noble friend Lord Tope, who has had to go back to Sutton, as he says, to be a councillor, has volunteered that this is too often a problem. The best consultation can be carried out to really high standards, but the authority forgets to feed back the outcome of that consultation—the results of it. Amendment 24 would flesh out Clause 6(6). The Minister may tell me that this is a detail too far but I think that it is important that when a revised version of the prospectus is published, the revisions are clearly indicated. I am thinking here of the mechanisms so readily available to us in computer programs that indicate the alterations which have been made. It will not be helpful with a complicated document to issue a revision without pointing ratepayers to where those revisions have been made. I beg to move.