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.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel