Increased valuations for business rates are often based on a fantasy

SIR – As the project manager for many of the big warehouse projects built for Britain’s largest supermarket chain, I was surprised that the Government has pegged the valuation of very large warehouse buildings to their “nominal rents” – and set their new business rates accordingly.

Yet there is no effective rental market, in the normal sense of those words, for these giant warehouses.

For example, Tesco, Sainsbury, Amazon and Sports Direct built warehouses to their preferred designs, with specialist handling equipment, in their preferred locations. These warehouses are too large, too bespoke and too specialised to be of any use to another company to rent. Peter Bryson Ilkley, West Yorkshire SIR – It is said that the Chancellor is considering options to help small retail businesses facing a large rise in their rates. There is a simple way to help: impose a £5 tax on internet-generated deliveries. This might reduce deliveries which cost under £20 and return lost business to the high street.

It would also be a long-overdue source of revenue from internet giants which pay nothing for clogging up our roads and delaying our journeys. Mark Jeffries Chichester, West Sussex SIR – While the value of freehold properties has undoubtedly increased in the last seven years, the actual value of any small shop site has almost certainly decreased. This is due to falling footfall caused, in part, by the rise of internet shopping but also by the lack of available and reasonably priced parking near our high streets.

To tax shop owners more (report, February 21) is simply wrong, given that the site they now have is worth less than it was seven years ago.

Business rates as they exist are outmoded and the system should be reviewed to take in the realities of the modern shopping world. Liz Beaumont London SW19 SIR – When the Conservative government was searching for an acceptable replacement for the poll tax, to fund local authority spending, Conservative leaders of local councils (of whom I was one) were invited to a meeting in Birmingham, chaired by Michael Heseltine, to give our views.

He impressed us all by taking the platform and announcing that he was not going to try to sway opinion, but would listen, and take our views back to the Cabinet, which would consider all aspects before bringing forward a new policy on local taxes.

Some 20 or so of us gave our views forthrightly. There was a great variety in the opinions expressed with one exception: we were unanimous that any new form of taxation should not be based on the unfair and outdated system of property valuations.

Very soon after this meeting the new way of funding was announced; it was to be called council tax and it was to be based on property valuations. Patrick Mountain Somerton, Somerset