I thought my council tax bill was bad... but look at business rates.

Why do people think the high street shops are emptying so fast? I keep explaining this to people who think that shops are ripping them off - they are not. For a typical smallish town high street single unit, you are looking at having to take £60000 a year just to pay for the unit

- not to mention stock, staff, utilities etc. We have a small town centre with now 30 emtpy shops + empty Woolworths. I had never realised just how much taxation cripples just about every aspect of people's lives.

Taxation should be to provide services for the community not to give central and local government workers an easy life.

I was reading a letter in the Telegraph or Times last week.

It was from a guy who owned around 20 shops in an arcade and was being forced to pay business rates on empty shops. He wrote to the Prime Minister's Office for an explanation as to why this should be to be told that it was to "encourage" him to let them. His question to the readership was "Why do they think I built them?"

The High Street gets hammered. I rent two buildings totalling 21,000 sq.ft. The rates I pay are less than someone I know who has just packed up her cafe, because she was paying over three times what I pay for about 4,000 sq. ft. It is ludicrous.

Showing how clueless you are as usual.

My wife is a midwife and regularly works longer than the 12 hours she is paid for, especially as she rarely gets lunch break due to staff shortages. But keep your ignorance going.

Both can be true of course.

Your wife could well be seen as a 'service for the community.'

After all she is not a central or local government worker.

Neb

Indeed. What is happening here is that secondary areas of the town centre, which 30 years ago would have been full of small workshops and shops at relatively affordable rent and rates, have been demolished rather than improved, and jammed with blocks of flats, thanks to Prescott's urban densification policy. Where are small busineses (the backbone of this country) supposed to go? High streets are too expensive, out of town business parks are too expensive. If we are ever to recover from Nu Labour management, I don't know how because reversing what has happened would be a monumental and wasteful task.

What is most ludicrous is to see councils and government ministers wringing their hands when they *know* full well how to encourage business start-ups in towns. They just won't do it. When are we going to hear any prospective governmental party promise to slash taxes? Why are they do scared to do it now?

PS. We are now getting one or two units a week burnt out in 'arson' attacks - oddly enough only the empty ones ever get burnt.

When it's those in government making the rules, we don't have a chance.

Does that "easy life" include education, police, and the fire service? That is where the lion's share of property taxes goes.

It'll be next year (2010) when things really shake up, because that'll be the start of the 5 yearly revaluation, i.e. new rateable values for everyone.

Roughly half of tax councils collect is from business rates. As such, can you imagine how much council tax would need to be if business rates were, say, halved? That'd go down well with the voting public, don't ya think?

Yeah, but to play devil's advocate for a second...

For every landlord who has business units he can't let no matter how much he tries, there'll be numerous others who will leave them sitting empty if there wasn't a financial incentive not to.

For example, say it'd cost 20 grand to refurb an old shop to a lettable condition, but they'd only get 5 grand a year in rent - if they can let it at all. A landlord may consider it not worth the hassle, and decide to leave it sitting empty for years as a ugly blight on the area. For obvious reasons, councils don't want that. So make him pay 10 grand a year in rates, and suddenly, the incentive to do them up and let them, demolish them, or convert them to domestic, is much greater.

What if it's not a case of not considering it worth the hassle, but that they have a sub-lease (if that's the right word) and can't afford to lower the rent? 50% of the empty shops in our town (and a good proportion of them are empty) are up for sale as well as lease.

to leave it sitting empty for years as a ugly blight on the area. For

And what they have done here is demolish them and sold the land to developers for flats.

Gold-plated pensions? Stupid salaries for unnecessary jobs?

Size isn't everything... . Business rates are based on a hypothetical rental value. So if say your "two buildings" are old industrial units on a run down industrial estate, and your equaintance has her small cafe in a prominent shopping location, then their rental values are not at all comparable, and hence, nor will their rateable values be.

Well exacty. But unfortunately, like much in life, to incentivise those who *could* let or convert their units, it hurts those who can't. I'm sure as armchair experts, we've all got our own ideas of how we'd solve it all, but rarely are we in full possession of all the facts and figures.

Supermarkets are playing a large part in that trend too. The high street and the corner shop are dying. Tescos is slowly strangling them.

True. And the other half comes roughly 50-50 from two other sources, namely council tax and central government.

No, I can't. In fact, council tax would not necessarily need to go up at all. It could even be abolished. Instead, the central contribution could go up. That in turn would probably require an increase in income and corporation tax rates, but what's wrong with that? They are, after all, comparatively low at the moment. The basic rate of income tax was over 30% not so long ago.

Actually, Tesco are increasingly *setting up* corner shops.