How we can help our high street shops to survive
FOR the third year now profits are tumbling at Next and they’re not the only ones. Many high street retailers are affected by a perfect storm of sky-high rents and rates and internet mega-traders that don’t face the same costs.
For thousands of years market places have been the very hub of civilisation – and it’s not just the buying and selling that is essential to our humanity. Going shopping gets us out of the house and chatting with people. It makes us feel better but if we left it to the T-shirt-wearing tech billionaires they’d have us stuck in front of a screen all day ordering our food online.
It’s time for the high street to fight back. The main burden faced by high street retailers is absurdly high rents and business rates.
In my hometown a very successful independent café has been forced to close. It was doing everything right, was in local guidebooks, always full, but the young owners said it wasn’t enough. Their combined rent and business rates were £60,000.
You’d have to sell at least 20,000 cups of coffee to meet that before paying staff and catering costs – and forget about making much of a profit. The young café owners have now given up running their own business and are going to get jobs working for someone else.
BRITAIN was built on small traders and yet we’re stifling their entrepreneurial spirit. Central government has pushed the task of collecting business rates on to local councils and they are using them to fill their coffers. Councils have to meet the demands of rocketing social care costs and they are ratcheting up business rates and rents on commercial property they own to help fill that hole.
As a result shopkeepers are facing crippling overheads and yet the big online retailers can carry on selling without having to shoulder any of the burdens of high street outlets. As we well know, many of these huge retailers such as Amazon don’t even pay their fair share of tax. It is far from an even playing field and it’s no surprise our high streets are dying as a