High Street Businesses: Government Support

Andrew Griffith Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2026 Westminster Hall

[Andrew Griffith (Arundel and South Downs) (Con)]

What a pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell, and to make common cause with so many hon. Members. Our passion for our high streets—something we share, as proud representatives of our constituents—has come through in all the contributions to the debate. I thank the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover) for sharing that with us. I speak on behalf of my own wonderful high streets in Midhurst, Storrington, Arundel, Steyning, Petworth, Pulborough and Henfield —we are so lucky to have them, Ms Lewell. I hope that you will come and visit them, and the Minister always has an invitation to see the wonderful enterprises in my constituency.

Here I fear that the consensus may break down a little, but I hope that the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage and his colleagues will join me in condemning the decision of my local Lib Dem district councils to increase parking charges and bleed the life out of our high streets—an unwarranted headwind, transferring economic life into the coffers of the town halls. I invite the hon. Member to join me in seeking to reverse that unwarranted decision.

The Minister is a good man, and many of these measures were not of his making, but I fear that what we are seeing is the Government’s fundamental—albeit perhaps unintentional—misunderstanding of business: what it is to combine so many different factors of production, to take risks and to try to give back, through economic activity, to our communities. We heard many examples of that today. We heard about the difficulty for employers of making ends meet with the unwarranted increase in national insurance—not just the rate but, in particular, the threshold. Anyone who really understood the granularity of business, and the number and mix of part-time employees who were previously outwith the national insurance net, would never have made the decision to reduce the threshold from £9,100 to £5,000, encompassing at a stroke hundreds and thousands more employees. What do businesses do when faced with the anaemic top-line growth in the economy and the pressure on consumer household spending? They have to sit down on a Sunday afternoon and work through the shifts, trying to pare back hours and work out which employees they may let go.

We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for South West Hertfordshire (Mr Mohindra) the challenges of making the business rates calculation add up. I accept that this challenging problem did not start at the last election—I am very ecumenical in that sense; it has been creeping up on us for a long time—but the first and best advice that I got was that when you are in a bit of a hole, you should stop digging. Rather than the permanently lower business rates that we were promised and that businesses relied on—many placed their votes accordingly —we have got permanently higher business rates. That started with a swingeing increase. The Government, under pressure from other parties represented in this House, listened—eventually—and have mitigated that increase through some welcome measures in the short term, but they have done nothing to provide the long-term relief that for many would mean they had a viable future as a business.

I know that the Minister will have been given some brilliant lines to read out this afternoon, but I ask him, in all seriousness, to hear the will of the House on the perennial challenge of business rates, perhaps work on a cross-party basis and see what we can do over time to lance this very difficult boil. This is part of an overall picture of spending first and taxing second—certainly, that is the view of the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, from his description of meetings with so many of his colleagues.

The challenge is that we are just not seeing any top-line growth, any confidence in the economy, anything to make people think that it is a good idea to go and start an enterprise, to hire people, to take some risk in our high streets. We all want that for our communities. We want our high streets full of lively, independent, diverse shops catering to the needs of local people, not merely those catering to the lowest common denominator —vape shops—or, meritorious though they are, charity shops in perhaps too great an abundance.

There is a real desire to work on the future of the high street, because we all care so much about it. We need the employment opportunities for our young people. We have heard about the challenges for the hospitality sector. VAT is of course one potential relief, but what people are telling me is, “Just do something. Stop piling more and more taxes and levies”—packaging taxes, bed taxes—“on us. Let’s have a little bit of a moratorium.” My party’s fully costed plan would go much further by taking 250,000 small businesses out of business rates entirely. I know that the Minister will disagree, but I am afraid that we would go back to the very settled status of employment law that was good enough for Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. It persisted for many years and gave many of our young people the opportunity to get their first foot on the ladder, particularly with starter jobs. Indeed, some hon. Members have spoken today about their own first experiences working in hospitality and retail.

I will leave it there, but I am very keen to hear from the Minister what new hope he can inject into our souls and hearts—we want to take it back to our high streets to give people good cheer, so that they are no longer just surviving, but thriving. I leave the final word to the Prime Minister’s Chief Secretary, a man infamous for his self-confidence and, I am told, more than a little ambition. Upon discovering that the nation’s growth plans are in the hands of the right hon. Member for Leeds West and Pudsey (Rachel Reeves), he said:

“It doesn’t fill you with confidence.”