Baroness Pinnock (LD)

My Lords, I remind the House of my relevant local government interests, in particular that I am a councillor in Kirklees. At the outset, I wish to express my thanks to the Minister and his officials for their time in discussions on the details of the Bill. I had assurances at those meetings that the measures in the Bill are not designed to increase business rates revenue, although that ignores the consequence of the Bill that, for RHL—retail, hospitality and leisure—businesses, Covid relief disappears, and the difference is partly funded by those businesses. Importantly, the Minister also confirmed that local government funding in totality would not be affected and that, “as far as is practicable”, no individual council would find itself worse off as a result. What is unfortunate, though, is that the Government have been unable to share the basic assessment that must have taken place to provide the assurances given. Thus there is no clarity about the impact of these changes on individual properties—hence Amendment 1 and consequential Amendments 9, 10 and 17 in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Fox, which seek to understand the impact of the changes on the NHS. The useful information shared by the Minister from the Valuation Office Agency shows that 290 NHS hospitals will be caught by the new £500,000 threshold. Given that the standard multiplier is currently 0.546, or 54.6 pence, in the pound and the Bill enables the multiplier to increase to 0.646, or 64.6 pence, in the pound, for these higher-band properties, this will cost those hospitals dearly. I warned the Minister that his failure to provide examples would mean that I did the calculations. For example, the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children has a rateable value of £5.9 million, and its business rates costs will rise from £3.2 million to £3.8 million, an additional burden of £600,000 per year on business rates alone. The John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford has a potential business rates increase from £3.4 million to £4.1 million. Going further north to my own county of Yorkshire, the Hull Royal Infirmary could see its bill rising from £1.8 million to £2.1 million. Those are typical figures for hospitals across the country. I do not believe that it is the Government’s intention to reduce hospitals’ ability to drive down waiting lists, yet that will be the impact of these changes and the consequent higher charges. Amendment 1 seeks to exclude hospitals from the higher threshold multiplier to prevent a further burden of taxation falling on the NHS. The Minister will, I am sure, want to comment on the fact that, while NHS hospitals will see a huge rise in their rates, about one-third of private hospitals have charitable relief of 80% of their rates. He will no doubt say in his reply that it is not possible to allow exclusions to the Government’s scheme, but that just demonstrates that the whole business rates system is no longer fit for purpose, because the rateable values on which it depends are inevitably higher in cities and urban areas, while distribution warehouses benefit in rateable terms from being out of town. The whole system is topsy-turvy. The Government’s express purpose was to tax those fulfilment warehouses more to help save our high streets—in their words. They failed to say that this will also clobber our NHS. That will not do. Hospitals must be excluded from the higher multiplier. I beg to move.