Business Rates

Lisa Smart Excerpts

Tuesday 27th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[Dan Tomlinson]

I thank my hon. Friend for his persistent and powerful engagement on these matters. He is an expert on all things high street and business rates, as I have come to know. Let me point him to the transforming business rates work that the Government have been publishing and advancing. One possibility that we are considering carefully and talking to businesses about is changing the business rates system from a slab system to a slice system. At present, if a business goes over an individual threshold, the new tax rate will then apply to the whole value of its property. Reform is always tricky, but we want to investigate whether changing to a slice system, whereby the tax rate would not involve those big stepped increases, would support investment by businesses on high streets in Rossendale and Darwen and across the country.

[Lisa Smart (Hazel Grove) (LD)]

William Robinson is the managing director of Robinsons Brewery, on my patch. His is the sixth generation running a brewer, a bottler and more than 250 pubs, inns and hotels across the north-west and north Wales, as well as an important bottling plant in Bredbury. William has written to tell me that the present system is destroying confidence, businesses and future investment, and therefore jobs. Does the Minister accept that repeated changes such as moving from the removal of reliefs to this package, including frozen bills and a temporary 15% discount, have created huge uncertainty and anxiety for pubs as they are making important investment and staffing decisions?

[Dan Tomlinson]

There is a big picture that we need to move to with business rates: making sure that, permanently, we have differential treatment for retail, hospitality and leisure businesses and those with higher value, particularly the large online warehouses that are causing the economic rebalancing that we do not really want to see and that is harming our high streets. The Government set out the reforms in the Budget in respect of the 5p reduction in the multiplier. As I have explained to Members, that is a transfer of nearly £1 billion in tax away from the high street—less tax—towards the larger online giants. I want to continue to engage on all tax matters that affect the high street in the run-up to the next Budget, and decisions will, of course, be made in the usual way.