I’m very pleased to take part in this debate and I commend Plaid Cymru for bringing this motion before the Assembly. Adam Price can always be relied upon to be an attractive face of his party—[Laughter.]—and is a fund of good and interesting ideas. And there are some of them in this motion. [Interruption.] You want me to withdraw that remark. [Laughter.]

Edmund Burke said that

‘To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to man.’

A good part of the debate today has concentrated upon the business rating system and rightly so. I listened with interest to Jenny Rathbone’s attempt to defend what I think is a very largely indefensible system, and surely it’s a mark of a very bad tax if such a very large proportion of the people who have to pay it have to be relieved of at least a part of the impost it imposes upon them. What we should be looking for are taxes that relate to people’s ability to pay and they should be borne by as large a number of people as possible at low rates. On that basis, then, taxation does not get in the way of generating wealth and increasing prosperity.

The part of the motion that refers to making the whole of Wales an enterprise zone is certainly an interesting idea, but the whole point of enterprise zones has been that it’s been for targeted intervention on specific areas that have specific problems. But I’m very much in favour of making Wales into an enterprise zone in the widest sense. In another place, in the 1980s, where I was imprisoned inside the House of Commons night after night after night as a result of the problems that revaluation of property then caused for local government finance, we debated these issues at great length. Subsequently, when I became the deregulation Minister in the Major Government in the early 1990s, I tried to make it my mission to turn the whole of the United Kingdom into a low-tax, low-regulation economy so that we would then be able to obtain the competitive advantages to which the motion refers for the whole of the United Kingdom. So, I’m broadly in favour of the approach that Plaid Cymru are taking here.

Business rates are an archaic form of taxation, as we know. Adam pointed out the other day that they go back to the 1601 poor law in the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth. It is bizarre, isn’t it, that you will pay more in a tax if you improve your property? But that’s the way in which the rating system works. So, it’s a disincentive to people to improve properties. The way the economy has changed—this was referred to again by Adam Price the other day—with the growth of the internet, properties that are based in specific locations on the high street are of less and less importance as a proportion of the national economy, and yet, the burdens that are imposed upon shops, as were very eloquently described by Janet Finch-Saunders, have denuded our town centres of life and vivacity. It’s a bad tax indeed that empties out the centres of our towns and cities, although interesting ideas such as Simon Thomas pointed out in Narberth are certainly a response to that. But the shop vacancy level in Wales has been referred to by several participants in this debate today and I know that this is one of the biggest hurdles anybody thinking of setting up a business has to jump; it’s something you simply can’t avoid, even though the purpose of the tax was to be unavoidable and that’s why it’s a tax on property. The way it works now is that, yes, indeed, the tax is unavoidable for the property, but it’s not unavoidable for the business, and if the business can’t afford to site itself in a property to pay the tax in the first place, then it’s actually a very counterproductive tax indeed.

So, it’s the inflexibility of this tax as well, which pays no account of the changes in the levels of prosperity from one year to another, which is important to consider. We go through a business cycle, but the tax itself stays the same and so, actually, when the economy’s going into a downturn, it actually accentuates the downturn. So, that is indeed an irrational form of taxation. We’re just going through this revaluation process now, and although I know it’s intended to be revenue neutral, as Nick Ramsay pointed out in his speech, it’s going to hit particular constituencies very hard, and Monmouthshire is one of those areas where the overall rise in rateable value is 7 per cent. It’s actually 9.2 per cent in Conwy up in north Wales, whereas, of course, in other areas, there are significant reductions. The Vale of Glamorgan, for example, is having an 11 per cent reduction in rateable value, and Neath Port Talbot the same and so on and so forth.

The way in which this revaluation is going to impact upon people will vary from place to place. But we must, as part of the impending opportunity that we have to re-evaluate the way in which we tax properties, really look at innovative answers to these problems, and tax, at the very least, land values rather than the buildings upon it. So, this is the first of many such debates I’m sure that we shall be having on this subject.