Report comment

It perhaps best demonstrates how little the Labour party understands of the Non-domestic rate system. Come to that, how little most of those calling for changes understand of it.

There is a quite fundamental problem with the whole system, but the pundits, Grimsey, Portas, Umunna, and lots of others, are simply looking at the symptoms and reacting rather than analysing the underpinning disease.

Business rates as the non-domestic rate has inaccurately become known, is living up to its sobriquet. It is a tax on business rather than a property tax. It is true that it is only applied to those occupying premises, but that is almost a secondary issue. There are differences in the valuation depending on the type of business occupying the premises, and there are differences because of the size and scale of the business occupying those premises. There are countless subjective variants to promote or rebut a whole phalanx of discounts and reliefs which appear to benefit a few, and usually those least likely to need the benefit.

The delay in the quinquennial revaluation was a catastrophe that will benefit just the Treasury, but because of the poor understanding of the rates systems in Parliament, the most inaptly named 'Growth and Infrastructure Act, 2013' was passed without any real challenge by members of either house, in any party, or none!

The fact that the media most closely associated with the discourse on rates and the all too readily linked discourse on town centres are also woefully uneducated about this subject, the debate for change is regularly hampered by yet more panacea type proposals that simply miss the point and take even more time to get out of the line of sight to real change.

Excepting the effects of the Growth and Infrastructure Act, the changes that are required to make the 'business rate' problem go away does not need Parliamentary time or legislation - no-one seems to noticing that fact. It simply needs a complete overhaul of the methodology and decision making process at the Valuations Office Agency within England and Wales and the equivalent in Scotland.

Throw out the daft meaningless complex rules devised by 'professional bodies' to keep their members in work for the duration and replace them with simple unequivocal spatially related measured criteria which are simply based on the property and not upon its occupants.