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Council Tax Capping (Surrey)

I am sure that it was a very important minute and I sincerely apologise. The problems with capping have been characterised perfectly clearly in the debate. The hon. Gentleman spoke about the cost of police jobs and the impact on the local area, the potential impacts on the budget for many years to come, and the nonsense of the Government expecting a police authority to eat into its own reserves. A number of hon. Members explained that that is like using a hammer to crack a nut. It is a ridiculous situation: budgets are set on a notional basis and it is if local authorities are working out what they are supposed to be doing entirely in shadow. We have notional budgets, caps and council tax levels, and nobody knows what they are supposed to be doing until well after they have set the budget. It is telling that so many of Surrey's MPs are here to speak in favour of their police authority. My understanding is that local Liberal Democrats have been supporting the police authority in this action, so the Labour party is rather on its own. The problem is that capping comes right at the end of the process—police and local authorities have already gone through the process of setting their budgets when a cap is imposed. They will have gone through the process of different departments deciding their spending priorities, and anyone who is on a fixed-term contract knows that they have a contract. Then, right at the end of the process, the Government threaten to slap a cap on the authority and expect it to somehow remove a large sum from its budget, which undermines the whole planning process. It is as if we go through a macho charade once a year. The Government refuse to tell local authorities what the cap is and what they are expected to do, and the authorities are supposed somehow to work it out by some process of osmosis or telepathy. When they get it wrong, the Government take draconian action that inevitably results in council tax payers picking up the cost of re-billing, either in future budget cuts or directly. The long-term result is that the relationship between central and local government is utterly undermined.