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Council Tax Capping (Surrey)

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Mole Valley (Sir Paul Beresford) on securing this important debate. The fact that so many Surrey MPs have turned up and that they have so eloquently represented their constituents' concerns about the capping of the Surrey police precept demonstrates to the Minister, I hope, how important the issue has become. I welcome him to his new role. I shall keep my comments as brief as possible, because a lot of questions have been posed and concerns raised, and we now need the Minister to answer them. It seems to me that today's debate involves irony on painful irony. Council tax has doubled under Labour, yet Ministers have made no complaint about it. Different approaches are taken in different parts of the country. The Met precept, charged by the London Mayor, has quadrupled in the past 10 years—it has been frozen, thank heavens, now that we have a new and better Mayor. Again, the Government took no action on that. Yet when Surrey police, which clearly faces a range of challenges on the policing front—perhaps more than most police forces—put a toe out of line, the Government imposed a disproportionate cap that, as we have heard, will cost practically as much to enforce as it will raise.