CAB128-94_A1b — Page 148

CONFIDENTIAL CMO until 31 December 1992

Page 148

ONFIDENTIAL

rateable value authorities to help them with the transition. With this new scheme of transitional relief the total figure would be over £1 billion. Further effort was needed to get public understanding of the scale of this assistance. It was not, for example, yet fully understood that Community Charge benefit was paid well above the basic income support level.

b. It was essential to make it clear in public presentation that the Government regarded the decision to provide the further assistance as the end of the matter. It would be most damaging to imply in any way that the Government would or could do more.

The details of the scheme must be settled before an announcement was made. Such an announcement would be followed by questions about exactly how the scheme would work in practice, and it was important that answers should be available at once. Presentation of the new scheme would need great care. The details were difficult and would need to be put across clearly in a packages tch included a simple explanation of Community Charge

benefit

d. It had to be recognised that operation of the scheme would impose a futeurden on the local authorities. They would ask for more resources to finance the administration, and there was a risk that some of them would fail to do the job properly.

e. A decision abete length of the transition had not yet been taken. The Goverment should consider the withdrawal of this new scheme of relief area safety net and housing benefit rebates together and ensure that their combination did not have unacceptable results.

f. The announcements by the mister of Local Government at the Conservative Party Conference and by Lord Hesketh in the House of

Send Lords would have to be careful Coordinated. Any significant interval between them must be koided.

THE PRIME MINISTER, summing up the discussion, said that the Cabinet endorsed the proposals described by the Secretary of State for the Environment, and he should now proceed as he had suggested. The extra expenditure resulting from the new sobem of relief would increase the difficulties of an already exceptionally difficult Public Expenditure Survey and offsetting reduction would need to be found from within the baselines of existing departmental programmes. The details of the scheme must be settled before the announcement so that the Government had answers to the questions that would be raised about how it would work in practice. It was essent at there should be no public reference whatever to the decisions boy made, and no disclosure of any details, until they had been formeday announced. The announcements would be made, as proposed, by the Minister of Local Government at the Conservative Party Conference on

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