High street will ‘collapse’ without changes to ‘excruciating’ rise in business rates, Labour MP warns
https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/rachael-maskell-tax-business-rates-5HjdQ6P_2/
by tylerthe-theatre
High street will ‘collapse’ without changes to ‘excruciating’ rise in business rates, Labour MP warns
https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/rachael-maskell-tax-business-rates-5HjdQ6P_2/
by tylerthe-theatre
30 comments
Not just business rates that need to change, but also how much landlords can charge. Surely that also needs to be looked at?
Business rates
Most shops are subject to paying business rates to their local council, at an amount directed by the UK government. This is calculated via a āmultiplierā which usually sits at around 50% of the rental value of the property. For example, if your rent ā or rateable value ā is Ā£3,000 per month, then your business rates will be approximately Ā£1,500 per month on top of your rent.
There are certain properties and business types that are exempt from paying business rates and the UK government periodically announces major business rate relief programmes to help stimulate small business growth.
In 2024/25 the Retail, Hospitality and Leisure Business Rates Relief scheme provides eligible, occupied, retail, hospitality and leisure properties a 75% relief, up to a limit of Ā£110,000 per business.
Whatever your business, it’s worth investigating the various types of rates relief available, especially for small businesses, as a way to save your business significant amounts of money while setting up.
Same MP who was a lead rebel against welfare reform. Not sure where she wants to get the money to fund this
It sees weird to me that we tax businesses just for existing, especially based on their rent
Just tax them on their profits (while simultaneously closing the bullshit loopholes big corporations use where they pay a ālicense feeā to a parent company based in a tax haven, where the license fee happens to be most of their taxable profits)
The highstreet is already dead, in its traditional form. If you want the modern highstreet which is thriving, it is called the out of town retail park.
Just accept it.
And, just for the record, what killed it was paying your bills by direct debit instead of over the counter in person. My granny used to have to pay several bills weekly at counters in town, naturally she did the shopping for the week at the same time. As did pretty much all over the people in town. Once they could shift to DD, they spent less and less time going into town for shopping.
This is just tinkering. The whole high street model needs targeted, revolutionary change. It costs me upwards of Ā£6 to park in my local city. There are fewer reasons for me to visit with the advent of the internet, so there are shuttered up shops along with the usual American sweet shops and Turkish barbers. The last big department store announced it was closing two days ago.
IMO, the high street needs to be more than chain restaurants and shops. We need new businesses and formats that offer excitement and a draw against the always-online world – but crucially are affordable without ancillary costs like sky-high parking.
Yet this is the same MP (Rachel Maskell) who has refused to accept any cuts to spending whatsoever.
Convenient that she leaves out that without money for the public to spend the high street also wouldnt survive.
We all know these companies are passing this rise onto the consumer and if the government reduces it now they aint just gonna lower prices. They will just pocket it /the majority of it.
Most small businesses are exempt from rates.
I suspect minimum wage and NIC rises are a much greater threat to them and certainly disincentivise employing anyone until it’s absolutely necessary.
But it’s certainly unclear why the government is doubling down on taxing local businesses and crushing hospitality while the low hanging fruit of private equity and vat evading foreign importers are just sitting there ripe for the picking.
A cynic might think it was some kind of ideological crusade or perhaps just looking after your donors.
could also be worth looking at the trend of making high streets harder to get to with a car, makes it harder to get shopping home and easier to go to an out of town place
leaves high streets for those without cars
an interesting thought but isn’t business rates an abstract land tax?
Isnāt a more permanent better standard of rates relief being introduced in April?
Majority of small businesses will cease to exist in before 2030
It collapsed years ago. Town centres are dead. Worth noting that businesses themselves have done nothing at all to adapt even thought the high street has been changing for decades. Literally all they gave been doing is whining about taxation. Even worse than that, the businesses in my high street have been resisting pedestrianisation for years. Because they think its imperative that customers can pull up directly at the shop door.
Government could stop all retail taxation tomorrow and these shops will still die. They are doing nothing to help themselves, They deserve to go bust.
To be honest the high street is dead unless councils step in and help plus getting rid of business rates and just taxing on profit. Or at least no business rates for businesses employing under 10 people etc.
If you look at like the big shopping centers they donāt just allow 20 vape shops to move in as nobody would go there but itās ok for high streets to be like that.
There needs to be like a planned goal for high streets and a targeted approach to bringing in complementary businesses, ie lower tax for a couple years if youāre a business thatās new and a higher rate or some surcharge if youāre the 5th business of that type already.
Also do something to improve and make these places look nice and attractive. Nobody wants to shop in run down places.
Plus make it easier to transition from like retail to nightlife. I went to Italy last year and in the evening some of the roads get closed off and restaurants put chairs and tables outside and the area isnāt just dead, people walking along and talking stop in for drinks etc. we need that kind of culture so itās not just a 9-5 area.
High street will collapse because it’s 30% or more cheaper to shop for the exact same thing online .
It’s not rates that have killed business it’s Amazon , but no one wants to ever blame them because it’s a convenience people won’t give up .
Business rates in London are absolutely crippling, its mad to have to often pay another 75% of the rent, non negotiable.
The system is stacked against small and entrepreneurial businesses beyond the first few years of operation for for large organisations with the ability to absorb such costs and avoid other taxes. Costa and Starbucks opening on a high street are a death knell to small coffee shops.
It has already collapsed in many places. Business rates are not helping but reversing those is not going to bring back dead high streets to life. You need a raft of measures to do that, but even that would ignore how shopping has changed. We need to gear them towards experiences to try and revive them.
Surely if they’re squeezed too hard then they fold and the owners of vacant streets get zero income?
The high street has collapsed, walked through the town centre the other day, pretty much every unit is empty, the ones that are left are doing no trade by the looks of it.
Do you know what would help?
Tax Amazon and any other companies that use legal tax dodging ways to scale up and crush UK businessās appropriately .
This is the same person who voted for even more unproductive welfare spending and then has shocked pikachu face when there is not enough money to actually do something productive (like reducing business rates).
This country is so full of economic illiteratesĀ Ā its awful.
Why can’t we just get rid of Sunday trading hours so businesses can open for longer?
If Turkish barbers, vape shops, and mobile shops can run profitable businesses then I don’t see the issue. Clearly everyone else has a skill issue, M&S included.
High streets will collapse anyway, there simply is not the same need for them that used to exist, they need to be shrunken down and concentrated, less shops and more experiences.
How can this woman be calling for lower taxes when she also campaigns for significantly more state spending? Pure fantasy.
Seems to me that the high street is more at risk from online shopping such as Amazon, than the normal business taxes (I may be wrong, I have done no research). Fairly sure that Amazon donāt pay their fair share in taxes thoughā¦
The rise of online shopping is proportional to the decline in high street shopsā¦ those that do not online shop, prove me wrong.
It’s not business rate and it’s not the lack of parking either.
It’s supply and demand.
There is no need to go to any High Streets if you find exactly the same shops you can find in any other town’s High Streets AND in 3 other parts of your own town too.
Our High Street for example has the same Greggs, the same Costa, the same Coffe #1, the same TGJones and the same Dominos that literally every other adjacent town has on their High Streets too. We also have another Greggs literally 10 minutes walk away from the High Street next to a Lidl and a gym, have another Costa 5 minutes walk from the High Street and have another TGJones 5 minutes walk the other way.
The two closest car parks (a long-term and a short-term) from the High Street are both less than 2 minutes walk, and both of them cost Ā£1/hour.
Apart of these stores, we have 2 tailor shops, 2 chippies, 3 charities, 3 vape shops, 1 candy store and 2 restaurants. That’s it. That’s our High Street. And that’s the same High Street in pretty much every damn town I’ve ever been.
We have a daily market since the end of 2024 that livened the High Street just enough so not a lot of shops had to close, but they’re building a market hall 150 metres from the High Street next to a Waitrose that’s due to open some time around the end of this year, and that’ll take the daily market off the High Street to one centralized space, because apparently having the market on the High Street isn’t centralized enough or something. Guess what’s gonna open in the new market hall? If you’ve guessed yet another feckin’ Greggs and Costa, you were right.
the hell should we keep High Streets alive if we offer absolutely nothing and give people no reason to visit them? If you want to go to Greggs, you have another 2 less than 2 miles apart… Same with Costa.
It feels like councils are stuck in this “doing the same and expect a different result every time” thing. I get that encouraging people to start businesses and open shops are risky because what if it doesn’t work, but for the love of God, if you open the same shops every feckin’ time, no one will shop up. No one will go there just to check out the new Greggs, because it’s not different to any other Greggs…
High Streets have to abandon the idea of having shops on it. Let’s use the space for something else instead. Sure, let’s keep the post office, bank branches and a few restaurants on it, but also open a nursery (if it’s separated from car traffic) and a toy shop next to each other. Convert shops to shared office spaces and open a Costa next to that. Open an arcade. A playhouse. Something else, something that’s not literally everywhere else too. As long as we treat High Streets as strictly commercial and offer the exact same shops to people, they won’t visit because they can go to the same shops closer to home, or to High Streets with better accessibility.
Shift the tax burden for both council tax and business rates onto the property owner and away from the tenant. It would reduce the speed of wealth redistribution towards the wealthy, reduce the burden on courts, we could get rid of a huge amount of council tax assistance benefit. It would be a game changer. Of course as it would slightly impact the rightist oligarchs it wouldn’t ever happen.
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