asked 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.

The 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.