Bronterre News

Enable resurgence by scrapping business rates for locally-owned shops – then town centres will be freed to carve out fresh identities

ABERYSTWYTH councillor and shopkeeper Ceredig Davies points out that multinational chain-stores now busy deserting the town have been responsible for driving up commercial rents and, consequently, business rates. 

  But he’s being unnecessarily gloomy in assuming that local businesses will now inevitably be stuck with a legacy of crippling rates. In fact, there’s no reason to accept that the current business-rates system is set in reinforced concrete. 

  Instead, the assumption must be that single-minded, cross-party political pressure is entirely capable of sweeping away this impediment to local enterprise.

  Town centres – and Aberystwyth’s is a prime example – have been hung out to dry by remotely-located chain-store managements. It’s not just the online obsession – still viable local branches of nationals and multinationals have often been closed down because retail empires see their wealth ebbing away and demand sacrifices.

  It’s now time for towns such as Aberystwyth to say enough is enough, and to demand total scrapping of business rates for locally and regionally-owned shop businesses – an unashamedly discriminatory tool to underpin a resurgence of, and a spicing up of, rural high streets.

  In Aberystwyth, for example, local businesses must be enabled to move into the empty, often roomy, shop spaces now littering Great Darkgate Street. Existing centrally-located, locally-owned businesses, many of whom are locked in a perennial struggle to pay rates from meagre takings, must without delay also be freed of their business rates shackles.

  Don’t assume, as jaundiced observers may, that inbuilt official inertia will ensure such radical change never happens. It most certainly can happen. And it must. 

  After all, businesses with rateable values of up to £6,000 already pay no business rates, and there is “tapered” rates relief for those with rateable values of between £6,001 and £12,000. (Because of Covid, the Welsh government has waived business rates for all retail, leisure and hospitality businesses with a rateable value of £500,000 or below, but that benefit is set to end on 31 March.)

  The government must now be pressed to speedily accept the urgency of adopting a scheme of selective scrapping of business rates. If it doesn’t, rural Welsh high streets will be heading for disintegration in a vortex of dust and despair. 

  There is every reason to believe that the dwindling number of chain-stores in Aberystwyth’s Great Darkgate Street is a blessing in disguise, a huge opportunity for the centre and, by extension, for the wider town, to revitalise, and essentially to refashion, its identity. To cease to be – as it had become – something approaching a carbon-copy of character-free high streets across Wales, and Britain as a whole.

  The entrenchment of online selling may be bringing commercial devastation to high street multinationals. But there is no reason why that should mean the boarding-up of Welsh high streets, their abandonment to dust-eddies and the odd clattering beer-can.

  With selective scrapping of business rates in place, the imperative will then be for Aberystwyth and other towns to recognise that the achievement of a successful future will rest on…being different. 

  It will be about profiting from positively not looking like every other high street in Britain, will be about, as it may seem paradoxically, doing well from being without such as Edinburgh Woollen Mill and Burtons and Dorothy Perkins. Anywhere-villes and their awful, dispiriting sameness have had their day. 

  For towns stuck in the rut of anonymity, online buying may look like the fatal last straw. But, long ago, other places realised the advantages of being different, and have profited decisively from that. Take Powys’s books capital, Hay-on-Wye; the jolly individuality of Tenby; the quirkiness found on the Gower; the art town of St Ives, Cornwall, with its Tate gallery; the comprehensively alternative Totnes, Devon. All have given themselves strong individual identities, their distinctiveness, their unusualness, lapped up by both local people and visitors.

  Aberystwyth hums with cultural, artistic and political life. It has some good – locally-owned – cafés and restaurants, the phenomenal Llyfrau Ystwyth, the wonderful Cerdd Ystwyth, friendly people and matchless seascapes and landscapes. It also has quite a few other inspired, locally-owned shops – and they’re nearly all tucked neatly out of sight in side-streets. Now’s the time to give local enterprise a break – by admitting it to the prime shopping they’ve so far been excluded from by the gold-plated monopolies now sinking fast.