CITY AM – Retailers urge Hunt to slash tax

A case for cutting business rates? Just look at our high streets

CITY AM SAYS The pain is doubled thanks to the government’s inability to properly modernise rates for the twenty-first century; warehouse-based retailers continue to have an extraordinary competitive advantage over those with city centre premises.

It’s a failure of leadership, and it’s short-sighted too. This isn’t about protecting old industries from new competition; plenty of weak physical operators have gone to the wall in good old fashioned creative destruction. But an uneven playing field is exactly that.

High streets matter; urban centres and vitality matters. It matters in cities like London and it matters in smaller towns and villages, too. 

A fair few years ago, this column offered the view that the success of “levelling up” would be defined by the health of high streets struggling against the tide. Years after that pledge was made, there are more charity shops and empty storefronts than there were there back then.

There has been precious little innovative thinking, and a tax system that’s become even more punitive. One does wonder. 

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