Government amendment No. 78: In page 19, between lines 9 and 10, to insert the following: “Amendment of Schedule 5 to Principal Act 30.The Principal Act is amended by substituting for Schedule 5, to it, the following:“Schedule 5 Plant Referred To In Section 511. A construction affixed to a relevant property (whether on or below the ground) and used for the containment of a substance or for the transmission of a substance or electric current, including any such construction designed or used primarily for storage or containment (whether or not the purpose of such containment is to allow a natural or chemical process to take place), but excluding any such construction used solely to induce a process of change in the substance contained or transmitted (in paragraph 2 referred to as the ‘substance concerned’). 2. For the purposes of paragraph 1 the following shall not be regarded as a construction used solely to induce a process of change in the substance concerned, namely any individual item of plant used or primarily used⁠— (a)for containment or transmission, or (b)for one or more actions or a series of actions, that may take place, before or after, the occurrence of action that induces, in a separate construction affixed to the property, a process of change in the substance concerned. 3. The fact that particular plant is not used on its own, but rather is used in conjunction with one or more other items of plant, does not disbar it from being regarded as an individual item of plant for the purposes of the preceding paragraphs. 4. All fixed furnaces, boilers, ovens and kilns. 5. All ponds and reservoirs.”.”.This amendment relates to rateable plant as referred to in section 51 of the 2001 Act, particularly with regard to the individuality of certain components of plant in manufacturing and industrial processes. For the purpose of valuation, plant is specified in paragraph (1) of Schedule 5 of the Act. However, there is an exclusion from valuation of any constructions which are designed or used primarily to produce a process of change in a substance contained or transmitted. For instance, such a process could be a chemical change, distillation or fermentation in various forms, depending on the type of plant or process in question. The long-established interpretation has been that the vessels or component parts of the plant where a process of change takes place are exempt from rates but that other items of plant, including structures and elements used for storage, are rateable. The High Court recently ruled by way of a case stated to it by the Valuation Tribunal that certain manufacturing plants in their entirety were exempt from rateability by virtue of the exclusion as currently contained in paragraph (1) of Schedule 5. In light of the ruling by the High Court and with a view to protecting the rateability of plant, as was intended by the legislation as defined in paragraph (1) of Schedule 5, I propose this amendment so as to restore the position of the rateability of plant to that which existed before the High Court ruling and to bring greater clarity to this area of valuation for rating purposes. The original Schedule 5 exclusion exempts the plant now used for storage or containment but which was designed to induce a process of change. This anomaly is also being addressed in this amendment. The amendment now proposed seeks to ensure that each individual component of plant is clearly discerned as being rateable or non-rateable in the valuation assessment. It will make certain that all constructions used for containment or storage of substances are to be valued, regardless of whether the change process occurs in such construction either before or after the substance has been transmitted through and-or temporarily contained in the quite separate constructions that are excluded from valuation because their specific purpose is to induce a change. The important issue here is to distinguish clearly between constructions used for storage, which are to be valued, and constructions used solely to induce a process of change as part of the manufacturing process, which are exempt from valuation. The purpose of this amendment is to address potential implications for ratepayers and local authority funding which could arise if the court's interpretation of non-rateability in this case is extended to other industries involved in manufacturing plant on a nationwide basis. This amendment seeks to reiterate the status quoin regard to differentiating between storage and the change process.