High St rivals pay their way

HIGH Street shops, already struggling under punitive business rates, are often paying much more in corporation tax, wages and national insurance than their online rivals, a Mirror investigation found.

For every £100 spent at Britain’s five biggest online chains, just 9p goes to the Treasury in corporation tax, £6.40 on staff wages and 63p for national insurance payments.

But at five of the biggest High Street stores, it is £1.50 in corporation tax, £13.20 on wages and 99p for national insurance – more than twice as much.

From the accounts of Amazon UK Services, it appears that for every £100 spent by UK Amazon customers, 0.5p goes on corporation tax, £6 on wages and 61p for social security. Amazon insists the tax bill is higher but is not revealing how much.

John Lewis plc made £10billion in UK sales last year, £1.2billion more than Amazon. It declared a corporation tax bill of £99million – more than 20 times higher than the £4.6million Amazon declared.

Its wage bill was £1.42billion – nearly three times higher than Amazon UK Services’ £530million.

An Amazon spokesman said: “This year we plan to create 2,500 permanent jobs across the country in research and development, our head office, customer service and fulfilment centres, to bring our total workforce in the UK to over 27,500.”