§ Mr. Evelyn Kingasked the Minister of Housing and Local Government if he will express the average amount paid in rates as a percentage of the average wages now and five years ago.
§ Mr. MacCollThe available information does not permit valid comparisons to be made. Information about earnings is available only for manual workers in manufacturing and certain other industries; there is however no information as to the rates paid by this group of workers, the available data relating to householders generally. A separate point is that many householders contain more than one wage-earner, so that a comparison of the sort asked for would in any case be misleading.