From Sky (h/t tip Bayard for pointing me to this)
The Committee urges ministers to give a six-month business rates amnesty for firms occupying empty properties and there should be an examination of whether retail taxes should be based on sales rather than the rateable value of a property.
The MPs also suggested that retail needed its own system of business taxation, adding that a six-month amnesty would encourage new businesses to the high street.
No, you cretins, no. If you base it on sales then owners are more likely to leave shops empty. No sales, no tax.
Retail is at it's most successful with a full town centre/shopping centre/retail park of varied shops . If you encourage people more to leave shops empty, they're more likely to do so. But it doesn't just affect that shop - it makes all the others less valuable too. Mark's covered this in posts about agglomeration, but in a nutshell, someone looking for a pair of spectacles, a new coat and some shoes for the kids would much rather go to one place with a number of providers so they can do it all in one trip. If you lose the kids shoe shops from your town, the shopper might decide to go to the next town because they don't want to do the specs and coat in one and then go to the next town for the rest.
It's also why the death of bricks and mortar retail hasn't been uniform. What we've seen is some places are still doing fine and others are struggling. As bricks and mortar reduced and travel got easier, it agglomerated in fewer, better places. A woman looking for a coat would much rather travel half an hour to have a huge range of coat shops than waste their time with a small number of shops. This then has a snowball effect that the losing towns/cities lose shops and go downhill. That's why Bath has a thriving shopping center and Swindon and Chippenham don't. Bath was always a better but it's now a lot better.
