To save the High Street, sack Mary Portas and slash business rates

On my way to chair a town meeting, I was chuckling over Phillip Warner’s cartoon last week headed ‘Mary Portas reinvigorates the High Street’. First, TV’s sharp-tongued queen of retail holds forth in front of a row of abandoned shops; then townsfolk dance in the street at the news that she has ‘buggered off in a taxi’. Call me an old cynic, but I think turning stars into tsars is a sign of Downing Street desperation: witness Alan Sugar’s lame stint as ‘enterprise champion’ in the dying days of Gordon Brown, and wince at James Caan from Dragon’s Den tackling social mobility. What I heard from the people of my own town, Helmsley in North Yorkshire, was not disappointment at being pipped by Margate and Market Rasen for a place in the first batch of Portas Pilot Towns chosen from ‘371 brilliant individual bids’ — I fear we forgot to post ours — but simple anger over business rates.

Of course the private sector should contribute to the cost of the public provision upon which it depends. But that deal has long been broken: businesses pay separately for essential services such as refuse collection, while rates have risen to levels that are crippling for independent shopkeepers struggling through a five-year downturn against online, out-of-town and rate-exempt charity-shop competition — not to mention the shortage of bank credit.

If you want an even-handed account of this issue, Radio 4’s Face the Facts gave it a good airing on 29 May. But let’s leave balance to the Beeb and go to the nub. Business rates raise £26 billion for George Osborne that he thinks he might otherwise have to take direct from you and me. Small firms in England, unless they qualify for relief, currently pay a ‘multiplier’ of 46p per pound of rateable value, based on 2008 rental valuations.