Business Rates: Affordability for SMEs

8. What assessment she has made of the adequacy of the affordability of business rates for small and medium-sized enterprises.

More than 700,000 small businesses across the UK pay no business rates at all as they receive 100% small business rate relief. We are transforming business rates over this Parliament. We are cutting bureaucracy, too—removing the need for the owners of small businesses such as family-run cafés to submit pages and pages of directors’ reports to Companies House.

Grassroots music venues are a vital part of the heart, soul and economy of Brighton Pavilion. Treasury Ministers have admitted that fairer business rates valuation methods are not currently used for many of these businesses—my local venues are calling the burdens punitive and a threat to viability. Will the Chancellor assure me that she will not forget grassroots music venues in her Budget?

We very much recognise the role that grassroots music venues play in constituencies right across our country. In our reforms, on which we will set out more detail at the Budget on 26 November, we will have permanently lower business rates for retail, hospitality and leisure premises, with rateable values below £500,000.

Despite representing only around 9% of the UK’s economic output, the retail and hospitality sectors contribute around a third of all business rates paid. Does the Minister agree that high streets such as that in St Austell are public goods, and will he ensure that independent small businesses such as those he has described, which are central to our communities and economies, are no longer penalised by an arcane business rates system that undervalues their public contribution?

High streets in St Austell and constituencies right across the country need more support from the business rates system. That is why we are transforming the system to ask larger premises, including the warehouses used by online giants, to pay slightly more in order to cut permanently the business rates payable by smaller premises on high streets across the country.

I call the shadow Minister.

When the Chancellor imposed £40 billion of tax rises, she chose to double business rates for leisure, retail and hospital businesses—and she is going to come back for more. It may be in vain, but perhaps I can offer her a policy suggestion: scrap business rates for 250,000 shops, pubs and restaurants. Rather than hike taxes, will she adopt Conservative policy and control welfare spending so that we can back our small businesses?

That question barely deserves a response. The business rates relief we inherited from the previous Government when we came into office was due to end entirely in April of this year. It is only because of us that it was extended for a year while we put in place permanently lower multipliers for retail, leisure and hospitality businesses. Those are businesses on high streets right across our country, and that will be announced at the Budget on 26 November.