During the week Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg gave a speech to the Association of Convenience Stores about the future for Britain’s shops:
The supermarkets don’t just have the planning system working in their favour, they’ve also got the tax man eating out of the palm of their hands.
They say that every little helps but then set up hugely complex tax avoidance schemes. They are jumping through loophole after loophole while the Chancellor sits idly by as ordinary families and small business struggle to make ends meet.
Tax avoidance in this country isn’t small scale. It’s a slick and highly lucrative industry. An estimated £2bn is lost to this country every year in unpaid Stamp Duty Land Tax.
You can read the full speech and post up your comments on Nick Clegg’s website.
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6 Comments
‘Bout time we had a non-avoidable charge on land then – rather than the transactional imposter which gives LVT/SVR a bad name. (No doubt deliberately!) An estimated £200bn+ is lost due to that continuing failure.
Someone should blog about this:
http://is.gd/7sZd
Innovation is considered to be one of the great vritues of free markets.
But a lot of innovation goes towards avoiding paying tax and finding loopholes in regulations
Andrew Duffield: You may already be aware, but just to make your point more explicit…
Lib Dem policy (pdf) is to do what you suggest, move business taxation onto a Site Value basis. See page 12 of the above link for more information.
Thanks Andy – I am indeed aware. As Nick is also a member of ALTER, I was very disappointed he didn’t include SVR as a fifth policy point in his speech – particularly as it would do more to automatically level the playing field between small retailers and the supermarkets than any number of interventionist initiatives. I have offered up a similar point to his website.
If/When economic growth restarts we should be pushing for a Supermarkets Act. Bring the works under a single piece of legislation with either the Consumer Focus or the Competition Commision responsible for enforcement.
1. Actually break up monopolies (anyone with a 25% + local or national market share) rather than just winge about them.
2. Tobin tax style token levy on turn over to be paid to a local services fund. Hypothecated for activities that maximise multipliers in a local economy
3. Binding targets to progressively phase in regionalisation of some fresh products.
4. start bronze plating some animal welfare stuff. For instance Freedom Food status for Chickens. Or make the NFU/Tesco scheme on milk industry wide etc.
Super markets aren’t going away and strictly speaking i wouldn’t want them to.
However one of the building blocks of a post credit brunch/hubberd peak economy should be localisation/ fighting atomisation.
cheap food is great but it comes with other non monetry prices.