Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they intend to introduce a business rates relief scheme for bookshops analogous to that provided for public houses.

The Government has introduced a range of business rates reforms and measures to support businesses, including bookshops, worth over £10 billion by 2023. This includes, from April 2017, permanently doubling Small Business Rate Relief and raising the threshold for relief meaning that over 600,000 small businesses now pay no business rates at all, and helping all business by switching the measure of inflation, used for the indexation of rates, from Retail Price Index to Consumer Price Index.