High Street Businesses: Government Support

Rachel Gilmour Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2026 Westminster Hall

[Rachel Gilmour (Tiverton and Minehead) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the chair this afternoon. Ms Lewell. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover) for giving us the opportunity to speak in this debate on the importance of high street businesses.

It was once said by American President Calvin Coolidge that the chief business of the nation is business, but high street businesses in Tiverton and Minehead tell me of how they feel more squeezed than ever before. I must confess that my deepest frustration as an MP is seeing people and enterprises held back stubbornly and unnecessarily by basic challenges, and by Governments who have spoken the language of growth while too often acting against it. The cost of energy has been crippling for high street businesses. I commend the Government on having the antenna to keep out of Washington’s war, but that has not left us insulated from its effects; as alluded to by many, energy prices have soared.

The hikes in national insurance contributions, business rates being at the level they are, and the rise in the minimum wage make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to hire local young people looking for work, who often rely on summer jobs over the school holidays. We see that borne out in the number of young people who are not in education, employment or training, and in the mental health epidemic making victims of so many of our young people.

The high street is as much a place of commerce as it is of human connection, and when that hollows out, so does something vital in the lives of local people. I therefore simply ask this: what happens when the goose is no longer laying the golden eggs, when the tax revenue is no longer there, and when the properties sit empty? This is not sustainable.

I would like to say just a brief word on Europe: the most powerful growth lever available to this Government requires no new spending, no new legislation and no great political imagination; it is to ease the red tape choking trade with Europe. My constituents, including my farmers, tell me—in language rather more colourful than parliamentary convention permits—about the bureaucratic absurdities they have to navigate just to trade with our nearest neighbours.

In Tiverton and Minehead, threadbare transport is a choke on high street trade. For a significant portion of my constituents who do not have access to a car—and I have one of the poorest constituencies in the country, even though it is beautiful—public transport provision is so painfully limited that employment opportunities just a few miles away might as well be on another planet. That is a structural drag on our local rural economy.

It is also true that a local economy is only ever as strong as the talent feeding it. The skills gap that employers in my constituency raise with me begins here; backing business has to mean investing in the pipeline that feeds it. Without that, we get a brain drain away from rural areas. While that is far from a new phenomenon, it is a cumulative one, and my local rural economy bears the cost: businesses lose potential employees and communities lose the purchasing power and energy of young professionals, who might, with the right provision, have chosen to stay and build their lives in their community—the most beautiful constituency in the United Kingdom.