Following news that Andy Burnham has promised to cut pubs’ business rates by 20% if he becomes prime minister, Chris Grose, Rating Director at property consultancy Hartnell Taylor Cook, comments:
“The situation our pubs are in goes beyond just business rates. Costs of day-to-day operations are increasing, as are staffing costs. Consumer habits are also changing – the fact is people don’t drink in pubs the way they once did. Mix these all together with the burden of business rates and no one should be surprised that pubs have themselves a slightly poisoned chalice.
“That being said, we need less performance and more progress to fix our rates system. This is just more political tinkering around the edges. If the Government does want to keep the system they have, they would do well to strip it right back to the basics.
“The system needs simplifying, not further layers of change. Proper reform would start with delinking the rate in the pound – which should be a single, fixed rate that is not changed annually – from the total value of the rating list and removing reliefs as an anchor.
“Reliefs are temporary by nature; they are signs of placation and not progress. Once introduced, they also prove hard to strip away. They can be served up as happy surprises that improve the mood, and this tactic has been seen plenty in recent years. But these reliefs skirt around the core problem: the need to get rid of any mismatches between rateable values, the rate in the pound, and their relationship to a market that has changed significantly since 1990.”
