Andy Burnham promised to ease the cost of living if he becomes prime minister in his first interview since returning to parliament.
The Makerfield MP told LBC that if he became prime minister later this month, as expected, he would look at reducing business rates for some high street businesses,
Rates are incident upon landlords. Reduce them and rents go up. Why does Our Andy want to benefit landlords?
Might it work in the short term? Rents are sticky, rent reviews are only every few years and often upwards-only; they should be coming down but aren’t for existing tenants.
Long term, yes, it won’t help the tenants. And it won’t help new businesses, because new leases will be at the right market rent.
The shops on Orford Lane Warrington all have Rateable Values below 12k and so with the exception of the multis don’t pay business rates. Those in Didsbury Village are all in the 15k-30k range so would benefit from reductions – nice middle class bung Andy.
In 2029 his moniker will be Handout Bung’em, except wittier.
I tried to post exactly that comment earlier, but got “invalid email address”. Code Monkey Assemble!
I’m eagerly anticipating my tenant’s rates assessment to go negative so we start receiving payments. 🙂
Rachel just ramped rates significantly but rents have not had time to react yet. The cycle on Rents reacting to rates changes is going to be lease renewals so that is typically 3 or 5 years.
St Andrew of Burdenhard will prove a grave disappointment to anyone daft enough to have high hopes of him.
No-one here has any hopes of that walking political disaster.
As I posted over on Guido, I fear that in 6 months’ time we’ll be looking back on 2TK as some kind of golden age.
Keir Starmer appears to be both malevolent AND totally incompetent. So having Andy Burnham who is equally malevolent AND by most measures only somewhat incompetent, that might actually be worse.
Might.
“But he said he would look at hiking business rates on the giant warehouses which are emerging to service massive online retail companies like Amazon, while lifting high street shops and pubs out of having to pay the business rates.”
What a fucking twat. Business rates are about valuable land. Amazon warehouses are in cheap places.
The hallowed high street is as good as dead. And frankly, so are a lot of pubs
We can afford (a half each in) the pub maybe twice a month, which is fortunate as beer goes straight to our guts.
Most pubs are incompetent. Spoons are well run. Sell booze cheap, make up for it on volume. It also means they’re busy, so if you pop in, there’s an atmosphere.
Yup. The big PubCos (Punch, Stonegate etc) seem to be struggling. Huge discounts to get tenants in, and then the tenants usually leave once the discounted period ends. I hear retail is in a similar situation.
So, since rates are (meant to be), as you say, “about valuable land”, rates on the High Street, and particularly for pubs, should be coming down as their values drop, compared to out-of-town places where rentals seem more stable.
So Burnham might actually be doing the right thing, although for the wrong reasons and reasoning.
It’s the council killing the high street. Parking prices and availability mostly, but also coming down to ‘profit is evil’ and tax is just.
We’ve just been in the Dordogne and only once did we see pay-for parking. Considering that area is full of tourists in the holiday season, that’s quite surprising. Those towns and villages want to keep their in-town trade as there are plenty of Intermarché, Carrefour et al stores trying to take it away.
If anything, the French have a problem of not enough paid parking. Seaside towns like Royan are almost impossible to park in in summer because so much of it is free.
I think tourists are more spread out in the Dordogne.
Did you go down the caves? Any canoeing?
I visted the family pad recently, and the council there even bans *BUSES!!!* from the town centre. The place looks like the City of London in the height of the troubles, concrete road blocks and steel gates everywhere.
Also, a hint for car park operators: charge for the time WHEN THE CUSTOMER LEAVES!!!! HTF do I know how much parking time to buy *BEFORE* *I’VE* *DONE* *ANYTHING*?
Can anyone confirm if dying High Streets is a problem in rich countries like Switzerland and the USandA.
To be fair, the USandA is also a young country so never developed high streets in the same way that those conquered by the Romans did.
But you’ve got to think UK central government making high streety activities illegal in part explains their decline.
The USA doesn’t have them. The thing with town centres is that they were a product of trams and buses. Wheel and spoke. That’s what works for them. Once you have cars, you can be centreless. The death of UK town centres is more than anything about cars. You have shops, small retail parks mixed in with everything else. Many US cities were built up with cars being a thing.
Now, France still has their town centres, but that’s because France intervenes against the competition like out of town shops and online retail. So they have lots of crappy little bookshops where a TinTin book costs a lot more than buying from Amazon in the UK.
Government didn’t help, but it is mostly about the shift to cars and online.
I’ll have you know that USA is 250 years old! TODAY!
“The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people” – gets the blood flowing does that.
It’s not helping, but I buy nearly everything online because why wouldn’t I? So retail becomes about the things I need right now. Books, music, USB leads can wait a day.
Five years ago, I tried to give my business to locals. Checking Amazon was a last resort. Not anymore. I find searching for exactly what I want on Amazon so much easier than getting to stores,
searching for aisles, then for the exact item.
Quick delivery and easy returns, too.
Locals will have to survive with my just buying gas, food, and liquor.
Moron! Data provided to the UK Parliament Infrastructure Funding Review shows that when the government introduces localized business rate cuts—such as Enterprise Zone tax reliefs—between 65% and 100% of the tax savings are passed directly into higher rents, directly benefiting property owners rather than occupiers….Duh!
Maybe he’s more concerned about the loss of premises available to be rented?
Rates being incident on landlords just means the demand curve is very steep, but the supply curve isn’t. This shifts the equilibrium to a point where landlords get much less rent, which means a much smaller number of them are able/willing to supply at that price, and the ones that remain tend to be the bad ones who cut costs.
There is a tendency to think that taxing situations with inelastic supply/demand that enables large taxes to be levied without shifting prices is somehow a good thing – that it distorts the market less. But there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. A small change in price translates to a large change in the quantity bought and sold.
Benefitting landlords enables lots more landlords to provide premises to rent.
The same reasoning works to justify cuts to Council Tax.
Government shouldn’t be in the business of favouring one group over another. What it should be in the business of is just getting its knee of everyone’s neck.
Why be in government if you can’t put your knee on someone’s neck? You’re asking for the turkeys to vote for Xmas.
Yep. It’s not power if you can’t use it.
Putting up high street rents is the least of our worries. From the Speccie’s excellent Michael Simmonds’ Reality Check newsletter:
Starmer deliberately released dangerous prisoners early to make prison space for nasty tweeters. Unlike the normal legal process in which even murderers and rapists can wait months for trial, the nasty tweeters were before the beak and sentenced within hours.
That’s a bit more than “vibes”, and I think we all received the intended message loud and clear.
Palantir are another bunch of shitbag consultants, only with AI nobs on. You don’t need a specific tool or to pay £3000/day for consultants to consolidate data. I don’t think they’re evil, or anything, but the sums for this programme are utterly ridiculous, and that’s assuming it ever gets finished.
True, but at least Palantir have a bit of a track record for delivering something for the dosh we pay them, unlike, say, Crapita.
Most failures to deploy in government are because of government. The consultants take the blame, but it’s civil servants constantly changing their minds on the requirements.
That’s true, BiND. And it’s why people elect expressive personality types.
High school class president election prepares people for real elections.
Andeh has just cooked his own goose:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c982r5z7v0no
The only way he gets to succeed is to generate a short term jump in Labour poll ratings with lots of ‘hopey/changey’ schtick, go to the country while all his policies are still in the theoretical stage, and haven’t run into the buffers of reality, and with a following wind (and a great deal of assistance from the BBC et al) end up with a working majority. If he leaves it until 2029, then he’s screwed, because none of his ‘good vibez’ policies are actually going to achieve anything. If anything they will make the country go south even faster, because they all involve more spending, more borrowing and more taxes on the productive. All Starmer/Reeves’ economic problems won’t have gone away just because a matey bloke in a black T shirt is PM.
I guess Andeh is just another Sunak, wants to be top dog, but no actual idea what to do once there.
I guess Andeh is just another Sunak, wants to be top dog, but no actual idea what to do once there.
Haven’t all recent Prime Ministers been that? John Major was the last PM who struck me as somebody you could picture saying to himself, dammit, I’m just going to have to roll up my sleeves and do this job instead of getting on with my life.
Major? maybe the first of the over-promoted, in a role but no idea what to do.