ACT NOW BEFORE OUR FIRMS GO OUT OF BUSINESS
NICK Fletcher is the kind of person who keeps Scotland ticking over. Taking a gamble, he decided not so long ago to throw his savings into buying the lease on the Argyll Hotel – a beautiful eightbedroom property on the Kintyre peninsula.
Running a business in a remote area is tough. It requires staying power and persistence. The hotel was run-down but Nick and his team revitalised it and now employ seven local people – a significant number in a place that has for too long suffered from chronic depopulation.
Yet that success story is under threat. The hotel was revalued as part of the five-yearly assessment of all commercial properties in Scotland. Staggeringly, annual rates are to rise from £2,891 to £12,675.
‘The Scottish Government needs to step up to the plate now and acknowledge that there is something wrong when a small business like ours which is only three years old is facing a hike of 338 per cent in what we pay,’ Mr Fletcher said this week. ‘Something that, unfortunately, is likely to break the back of our business and, I suspect, many other small rural hotels.’
His story could be repeated by the owners of hotels, pubs and many other businesses across Scotland. Many are discovering to their horror the impact of massive rate rises, due for payment on April 1.
They include Stewart Spence, the owner of the Marcliffe Hotel in Aberdeen, a friend of Alex Salmond and a long-time SNP supporter.
Yesterday, he laid the blame directly at their door, saying: ‘Unfortunately we don’t have any businessmen in the Government.
‘The Finance Minister isn’t interested in speaking to anyone. Derek [Mackay] has been allowed to go and make these decisions without consultation.’
Trade body Scottish Renewables claimed last week that at least one energy firm was facing an astonishing 650 per cent rate rise in April.
As Martin Foster, chairman of one small company, Alba Energy, said this week: ‘The Scottish Government has facilitated a rates regime that will cripple the independent hydro industry it once claimed to support.’
The impression left from this sorry saga is one that is becoming increasingly familiar to observers of Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP Government.
Obsessed by independence, focused only on using Brexit to further their narrow political objectives, a crisis is allowed to develop, with the minister responsible asleep at the wheel, waking up only to pin the blame on somebody else.
It happened with our education system. Now it is about to ruin the business opportunities for hundreds of firms.
It was all so predictable. Last year, the British Hospitality Association wrote to Mr Mackay to warn about the ‘potentially severe impact’ of the revaluation. More recently, at First Minister’s Questions, Ruth Davidson has twice raised the matter with Miss Sturgeon, embarrassing her over the impact the changes are having.
Yet the response has been the same. We didn’t carry out the revaluation. It’s not our fault.
It won’t wash. Imagine the revaluation had been a UK Government responsibility. Furious letters would have been sent to Theresa May. Demands for urgent meetings with UK ministers and warnings of grave consequences would be issued. Yet the buck stops with Mr Mackay.
The business rates system is under SNP control. Firms which have complained to assessors have been told they have to act ‘within the parameters of the legislation we operate under’ – legislation set by the SNP.
IT is the SNP – not assessors – which has overseen the business rate regime for the past ten years. It is the SNP, not local authorities, which failed to put in place adequate reforms and failed to see a crisis coming, despite warnings.
Ministers say a review is forthcoming. Meanwhile, firms can appeal. That will hardly be of comfort to those who will be out of business by the time a new system is in place, or appeals heard. Nor is it acceptable. After a decade in power, the Nationalists’ message is that they need more time to fix things. Haven’t they had enough?
This inaction tells us something fundamental about government under Miss Sturgeon. I have criticisms of Alex Salmond’s regime, but there was a general acceptance that he understood the rules of economics and need to go for growth.
Under his successor, that basic understanding is lacking. The SNP has decided to increase the large business supplement for 22,000 firms in Scotland, to twice the rate seen in England. It also plans to make Scotland the highest taxed part of the UK.
Miss Sturgeon’s Government does not see business as the lifeblood of our communities. Instead, business is a cashpoint, from which funds can be extracted at any opportunity.
Nobody seems to comprehend that if businesses are squeezed too hard, they may collapse.
The SNP must now act. A statement in parliament next week is necessary. The least Mr Mackay should do is follow the calls of trade bodies and instigate an urgent review of this revaluation. He must no longer hide behind flimsy excuses that this is all somebody else’s fault. It is time for action.
This Government next year has an extra £500million to spend, thanks to extra funding coming on stream from the UK Government. This Government which, despite pleading austerity, found nearly £200million two weeks ago to stitch up a Budgetsaving deal with the Scottish Green Party.
It is a Government which effortlessly finds the cash for its pet projects, from baby boxes to free tuition, so long as there is a decent PR opportunity.
Most of all, it is a Government which now must act to rectify ten years of inaction and inertia – and support firms which are keeping the country alive.