Ms Josephine Feehily:

I must give the party speech. We did not value properties, as we do not know people's properties. That has been said many times and it must be repeated, because there is a narrative that is confusing people, particularly our telephone callers. It is a self-assessment tax under which each person determines the value of his or her property. We issued an estimate that is only necessary for the people for whom there will be enforcement. The only role of the estimate is in default of a return. Having said that, I will say that indicative value bands were used on our online map and on the PDF documents sent to various offices, which facilitated people in looking up local indicative average values and, by definition, approximately half of them are right. That is what the trends are showing. Approximately half are in line with our valuation and the other half are changing the valuations. Broadly speaking, approximately 11% to 15% are going up and the rest are going down. These are crude indicative numbers and we have not done the slicing and dicing on them. With average indicative values, one would expect half of them to be right, and that is the way it is looking. Members should not hold me to those numbers until we do an analysis.