Here’s what a real reform of business rates would look like

Of all the measures talked up ahead of the Budget, the reannouncement of a ‘radical’ review of the business rates was the least concrete in content but the most important in potential impact on the domestic economy, and especially on business investment. This column has banged on for years about the iniquity of a system that imposes the highest local taxes on businesses of any EU country, based on pre-crash rental assessments and bearing no relation to the value of diminishing local authority services. It’s a system that, on top of other economic woes, has brought devastation to town centres — and gets away with all this because it has no democratic accountability, since businesses have no votes.

Quite how the next government might right those wrongs in a ‘fiscally neutral’ way — that is, in a way which continues to raise at least £26 billion for the Exchequer — remains to be seen.