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Business Rate Supplements Bill

The hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) may have slightly misrepresented the position taken by the then Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth (John Healey), who strongly advocated the policy that is implicit in the Bill as presented to and agreed by the House of Commons that there should be a ballot as long as expenditure is over 30 per cent., but that there should not be an automatic ballot in other circumstances which could, as my hon. Friend the Minister has rightly said, involve unnecessary expenditure for relatively limited benefit. The distinction between BIDs and the BRS is that the BRS is for much larger capital investment, and BIDs involve far more local schemes, which may well go on for a long time. They are not necessarily limited to five years, as the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst suggested. They could last for 20 years as long as there was support for them.