The Future of the High Street

Zarah Sultana Excerpts

Thursday 10th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Coventry city centre is the beating heart of the city—a place that provides community, culture and character—but, like other city centres, it is struggling. Long-running trends of empty high streets have been exacerbated by this pandemic. Just before it hit, IKEA announced the closure of its flagship store in the city, and now it has been joined by the likes of Debenhams in facing closure. Across the country, more than one in eight high street shops now stand empty. Last year, 57,000 retail jobs were lost; this year, the figure is 200,000. While Coventry City Council is investing heavily in the city centre, right now shops, pubs and restaurants are struggling under tier 3 restrictions. I voted against the Government’s measures, in part because the economic support is totally inadequate. So again, I say to the Government: give businesses and people in tier 3 the financial support they need to weather this storm.

While this pandemic has pushed workers into poverty and forced small businesses to close, for mega-corporations and their super-rich owners it has been an opportunity to exploit. They are using this public health crisis to entrench their dominance, drive out competition and grow their obscene wealth. Take, for example, Amazon and its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos. Now with a corporation worth more than $1.5 trillion, Bezos’s wealth has soared since March. It is up $66 billion in the last eight months, meaning that he could give every single Amazon worker a bonus of $105,000 and he would still be as rich as he was at the start of this pandemic.

This grotesque wealth and Amazon’s growing dominance are of course connected with our struggling high streets, because Amazon has not got where it is by playing fair —quite the opposite, in fact. While workers and small businesses pay their tax, Amazon’s tax dodging is pretty legendary. Just last year, on revenues in excess of £13 billion, Amazon paid just £14 million in corporation tax. Its profits are up 35%, but its tax bill just by 3%. This is not a level playing field, so it is no surprise that small businesses and high streets cannot compete. Its employment practices are no better. From being forced to urinate in bottles to meet targets to almost daily calls to the emergency services to treat exhausted staff, Amazon’s workers describe being treated like “robots”. It is their labour that makes the company’s wealth, but it is Bezos who takes the wealth. To level the playing field, it is time we put an end to these unfair practices. It is time Amazon paid its fair share of tax, respected workers’ rights and paid a fair share. For the sake of our small businesses, workers and the public purse, it is time to make Amazon pay.