Council Tax Valuation Bands Bill [HL]

Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury Excerpts

Friday 11th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Marlesford on having secured time for this Bill and on his tenacity, as he managed to use the cities Bill in July to give us an amuse-bouche and almost a forerunner of his speech today. I also congratulate him on his bravery, as the story associated with anybody who has tampered with, or sought to amend, property taxes is not a very happy one. I suspect that my noble friend the Minister will, in her very charming way, want to give this Bill a very wide berth indeed.

I wish to highlight two of the points that my noble friend Lord Marlesford made which I think are important and will not go away. The first is the anomaly whereby, especially in London, the very expensive houses and properties of bankers, hedge fund managers and oligarchs, costing millions of pounds, are taxed at the same rate as the modest homes of people with much more modest jobs and earnings. My noble friend is right to examine how the bands can be extended to make those living in more expensive properties pay a fairer share of the cost of local government. If one of the canons of taxation is fairness, he is right to draw attention to that aspect.

The other point I want to highlight is how property should be valued; my noble friend raised this question. At the moment it is valued on valuations going back 25 years. It would be absolutely absurd if the rates of income tax were levied on the incomes earned 25 years ago. He has found a very ingenious way of dealing with this problem.

At some stage in the future, both those points will have to be dealt with. As I said, Governments are understandably badly scarred by property tax reform and they will no doubt delay dealing with this, but at some point it will have to be dealt with. The longer that takes, the greater the danger that the council tax system will fall into disrepute, as have other local government taxes in the past, and that when the adjustments have to be made, they will be even more painful than they need have been.

I congratulate my noble friend on having brought this Bill to the attention of the House and having highlighted what I think are really important points.