The Scottish Retail Consortium, the shopkeepers’ trade body, has hit out at a 69 per cent rise in tax revenues from business rates over the past 15 years, claiming that the punitively high tax hike is responsible for an increasing number of empty shop premises up and down the country.

The increase in non-domestic rates, from £1.4 billion raised in 1999 to £2.4bn in 2014, was revealed in a research paper on local government finance published last month by the Scottish Parliament’s SPICEe Information Centre.

SRC director David Lonsdale said that, over the past three quarters, the shop vacancy rate had deteriorated further and one in every nine retail premises in Scotland now lies empty.

“This is bad for jobs and for attracting more private sector investment into our town centres and retail destinations,” he said.

“If this is to be turned around then government needs to get a firm grip on the sheer cost of doing business. Retailers stump up a quarter of all business rates paid and this is ratcheted up year after year.

“If we are to avoid a further hollowing out of our town centres then firm action is required to fundamentally reform and significantly reduce the burden of Scotland’s business rates system.

“A number of retailers have already sought to decrease their store footprint in light of changing shopping habits and the exorbitant cost of property-related outgoings, and further rises in business rates may well accelerate that even further.”

Lonsdale added that an announcement by finance secretary John Swinney at last week’s SNP conference about giving councils the power to vary the poundage rate downwards in their area was not new as it had been included in the recently passed Community Empowerment Act.

Lonsdale also said it was highly doubtful that any hard-pressed local authority would make use of the discretionary power to reduce rates as no government funding will be available to help offset the cost and councils would therefore have to absorb the loss of income or offset it by cutting spending elsewhere.

“I would question how many of Scotland’s 32 local authorities have made any provision within their 2015/16 budgets to fund the use of this new power, given that they all knew it was coming in the legislation,” Lonsdale said.

Over the past three weeks the Scottish Tourism Alliance, CBI Scotland and the Federation of Small Businesses Scotland have all published manifestos ahead of next May’s Holyrood elections with all three bodies calling for an overhaul of the business rates system in Scotland.

Since the council tax freeze since 2008 and increases in business rates in every year since then, the Scottish Government now receives more income from business rates than council tax, revenues from which amounted to £1.9bn last year.