Victory for the Mail and the High Street

IN a magnificent response to the Mail’s campaign, launched in July, Chancellor Philip Hammond is to throw a £1.5billion lifeline to struggling high streets.

To be announced in Monday’s Budget, the package includes £ 900million of immediate business rates relief for almost 500,000 small retailers, knocking a third off their bills. For many, this could mean the difference between survival and closure.

Meanwhile, an imaginative Future High Streets Fund of £650million will go towards projects such as improving infrastructure and transport, vital for injecting new life into areas fast becoming urban wastelands.

Paying tribute to this paper’s campaign, a Treasury aide says: ‘As the Mail has long acknowledged, the High Street is more than just the shops it hosts – it’s a community hub providing essential services for people in towns and cities across the UK.’

After yet another dire week for retailers, in which Debenhams announced plans to close some 50 stores, these measures couldn’t be more timely.

Yet while Mr Hammond’s initiative is warmly welcome, it addresses only one side of a crisis that wiped out 50,000 retail jobs in the first half of this year alone.

For high streets have been suffocated not only by business rates, poor infrastructure and exorbitant parking charges. They’ve faced brutally unfair competition from taxavoiding online giants such as Amazon.

Yes, this paper understands successive chancellors’ reluctance to discourage such firms from investing in Britain, while they are able to take advantage of soft-touch tax regimes elsewhere.

But all over the world, there are growing demands that the high-tech giants should be forced to pay their due. This paper believes that if Britain takes the lead, other countries will swiftly follow.

Indeed, the time is surely right for Mr Hammond to screw up his courage and introduce a tech tax that takes into account these firms’ vast turnover.

This would not only boost high streets further by ensuring fairer competition. It would also help the Chancellor balance his books, as he faces intense pressure to find extra cash for the NHS, social care, Universal Credit, police and the Armed Forces.

Never forget, after all, that public debt is still rising after a spending binge that has added £1.5trillion to the state’s borrowing since 2001, costing an eye- watering £600billion in interest payments.

This means there’s no room for waste of the kind seen in London, where Labour mayor Sadiq Khan has spent an extra £9million on City Hall bureaucrats alone (though that’s nothing beside the catastrophic debts we’ll incur if John McDonnell gets his hands on the purse strings).

But with employment at a record high and tax revenues booming, the good news is that Britain’s finances are in a far healthier state than predicted.

This gives Mr Hammond leeway to cheer up the nation on Monday, with a Budget to inspire optimism and make Britain fighting fit for Brexit. His measures to revitalise the High Street are an excellent start.