Council Tax Valuation Bands Bill [HL]

Lord Desai Excerpts

Friday 11th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, on not only having secured a date for his Bill but having done it on his birthday, which is a rare achievement. The best compliment I can pay him about his Bill is that I wish I had thought of it myself.

We have had Prime Ministers fall on the question of appropriate property taxation. Your Lordships will remember that when we were trying to remove the rates, there were stories of little old ladies in large houses living next door to another house where there were four adult men working full time, and what a great injustice the rates caused. There were not enough old ladies in large houses in the census but that was the propaganda and therefore we moved to the community charge, or poll tax. The poll tax became a complete disaster but it happened because of the reluctance of politicians of all parties to revalue property according to what the market was doing. People who swore by the market—who had always sworn by the market—and encouraged property-owning democracy, and congratulated themselves when house prices were rising, refused to pass it on into taxation. That anomaly caused the loss of Mrs Thatcher and then when the new Government tried to do the council tax, my party—which used to listen to me in those days, long gone—asked me if I could think of an alternative. I racked my brains but I did not come up with anything as good and radical as the noble Lord has done.

This is an excellent Bill because it restores progressivity to property taxation. We do not have much progression when it comes to wealth taxation but he has at least restored it here—if the Government accept it, which I very much doubt because we already heard the noble Lord, Lord Flight, crying copious tears about people living in merely £3 million houses who are struggling to make ends meet; no doubt these sorry tales of the poor rich will multiply. But I hope the Government have the courage—they have the majority, they have the numbers and I am sure my party would try only to make it more radical, not less radical—to seize this opportunity and go ahead and do it.

The most brilliant part of the noble Lord’s suggestion is that rather than having any official revaluation committee, he is relying on the market to do the revaluation. By protecting people who have not sold a house since 2000, he is protecting the people who are vulnerable and have not moved out; they might be elderly and they do not want to. This is a humane, progressive, radical and economically intelligent Bill—a rare thing. It is so rare that it may not get government support but I urge the Government to support the noble Lord.