Welsh Lib Dem AM Mick Bates joins Don Foster in ignoring party policy over local business rates:

Bates calls for review of Small Business Rates Relief Scheme Montgomeryshire Welsh Liberal Democrat Assembly Member, Mick Bates has written to the First Minister to highlight the plight of small businesses in Wales and is calling for a review of the Small Business Rates Relief Scheme to help businesses survive through the recession. Mick said:“Small businesses are an integral part of the local economy and I am deeply concerned that many are being forced to close due to the high threshold for small business rate relief. [From Freedom Central: Bates calls for review of Small Business Rates Relief Scheme]

No Mick, all rates relief is a subsidy to landlords. If there's anyone you should be haranguing over business failures or near failures it is the landlords who think thaey can continue to rake in the same rent levels as last year when the property market has fallen out of their arses. Retail average property costs are now below levels last seen five years ago.. Landlords, as in 1909, are the only ones continuing to profit from this gloom. But it will be a short lived profit for if they see their tenants go to the wall they are unlikely to find other ones in a hurry and at some point in the closure of the high street there's a tipping point at which not only the empty plots are hard to shift but everyone else starts to want to leave.

It's an easy bandwagon to jump on. In theory at least government has more control over rates than rents (though in this case all local business rate relief has to be made up by other businesses in the collection area so you literally are robbing Peter to pay Paul) and so could do something. But when that something is the wrong something (further subsidy to landlords in this case), it is the wrong bandwagon to jump on.

If you have any control over rating policy in Wales then please, use it to promote our party policy would you!

Via Sharon Ball's blog I see that Don Foster has become a signatory on Peter Luff's Private Members' Bill:

Make Small Business Rate Relief automatic Bath MP Don Foster has become a signatory to a Parliamentary Bill that would see Small Business Rate Relief paid automatically to those businesses that qualify. [From Sharon Ball: Make Small Business Rate Relief automatic]

Oh dear! Given that it's a private member's bill and therefore unlikely to become law, do we really need to have our MPs supporting things that are directly contrary to party policy?

Yes, it sounds nice. I support the aims of supporting small and independent business where we can.

But rate relief is not a subsidy to business, it is a subsidy to landlords. It means that landlords can keep up higher rents because they know their tenants are not facing the whole of their usual property costs.

And not only that, but it is paid for directly by increasing the rates bill on only slightly larger businesses. Also, probably, often those local and independent traders we want to keep.

So, Don, do you know our policy on National Non-Domestic Rates? To replace it with Site Value Rating? A tax that, assuming these traders were paying the rent the market can bear, would be borne entirely by the landowners and that would encourage landowners furthermore to make more efficient use of their properties and, for example, build up the "living over the shop" market - something which brings 24/7 vitality and sustainability to suburban and small town shopping areas.

The last thing we want to be doing, perhaps especially in this centenary year of Lloyd-George's land taxing People's Budget, is to be supporting ideas that, whatever their good intentions, go against the principles of both L-G's purpose in proposing land taxes and our current policy.

If, on the off chance, this bill does make past its Second Reading - which is possible because it's the sort of unthinking "stimulus" that might get support from lots of MPs worried about how to support their local small businesses - I hope our Lib Dems will take the opportunity to amend it to reflect better our much superior policy.