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Business Rate Supplements Bill

My Lords, I support this group of amendments as they seem to make an awful lot of sense. We had a very good debate on this issue in Committee. Clause 6 currently provides that the authority has only to think whether it might be appropriate to consult. That seems an odd thing to include in a Bill. The consequence is essentially that the levying authority must consult those whom it thinks might be liable for the BRS before the end of the chargeable period of the business rate supplement., This amendment is almost consequential on our acceptance of Amendment 1, as there will be a mandatory ballot and they will be consulted at some stage. However, that is a wider consultation than the one being aimed at here. Amendment 23 is consequential on that. It states: ""The levying authority shall publish the result of the consultation"." An additional point here is the timely publication of the results of consultations with busy business people. In Committee we discussed whether there were more immediate, real-time ways of engaging in consultation so that members of the business community could track what people said. We also discussed such exciting activities as blogging which could be used to give the business community a more immediate sense of what other members of the business community were thinking about an issue, rather than having an extensive written consultation and then finding that businesses do not have the time to read or digest results stretching to several hundred pages. Amendment 24 currently provides that the levying authority has only to publish a revised version of the initial prospectus if changes are made after the consultation and it believes that it would be necessary and appropriate to do so. We therefore strongly support this amendment which provides that the authorities must publish a revised version of the initial prospectus. It is almost unthinkable that there could be circumstances in which consultation took place on complex schemes aimed at economic regeneration and feedback was received but then not one change at all was made to the prospectus. Therefore there ought to be an updated prospectus. The concept of a Green Paper moving to a White Paper is sound and ought to apply to the way in which these prospectuses are issued. The prospectus should perhaps be issued in draft Green Paper form and then in a final document to be published when the results have been collated and sorted. Our view is that the amendments would be nice to have in ordinary circumstances, but, given the decision of the House on Amendment 1, they are now essential. I very much support the amendments.