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Hard hit retailers ... a closed shop.
Hard hit retailers ... a closed shop. Photograph: Alamy
Hard hit retailers ... a closed shop. Photograph: Alamy

Rates hike 'could leave 275 towns without a bookshop'

This article is more than 6 years old

Booksellers Association’s chief executive tells meeting at parliament that ‘if something isn’t done, booksellers will be put out of business’

Booksellers are warning that 275 towns across England and Wales could be left without a bookshop as a consequence of the rise in business rates earlier this year.

Booksellers Association chief executive Tim Godfray told MPs at a parliamentary reception earlier this month that a quarter of high-street bookshops are facing a minimum 10% increase in business rates – a statistic drawn from a March survey of its membership – and that “if something isn’t done, booksellers … will be put out of business”.

“If even half of those bookshops were to close as a direct result of rates’ increases, then 275 towns could be deprived of a bookshop,” said Godfray.

He pointed to Waterstones in Bedford, which he said pays £850 per square metre in business rates, while “Amazon just down the road from this Waterstones pays at its Marston Gate distribution centre £52.50 – that’s 16 times less than Waterstones”.

Bookseller Tamara MacFarlane, of Tales on Moon Lane in Herne Hill, London, said that their business rates had increased by more than 300% since the start of the year. “It has hit bookshops particularly hard because of fixed prices on books,” she said. “Most businesses can pass the rise on to their customers but because books have fixed prices, we have to find savings elsewhere … it’s really tough.”

Tales on Moon Lane has been forced to cut back on both staff and community work since the rate rise. “We’re on such tight margins anyway and we can’t afford to do our community work, which we feel is vitally important but which doesn’t bring in money. It’s an outreach programme to communities that don’t necessarily have many books,” she said. “It seems a very counterintuitive tax, particularly when they’re trying to increase social mobility and raise literacy levels, something in which we can play a vital part … It’s a crazy thing to do anyway, running a bookshop, and it’s really frustrating not to be able to do the community side.”

Baroness Gail Rebuck, chair of Penguin Random House and a Labour peer, raised the issue in the House of Lords last week, asking Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth, a minister for communities and local government, to comment on “the cultural consequences of the 275 towns that will lose their bookshops – sometimes their only bookshop”.

Bourne told her that the £300m discretionary business-rates relief scheme, made available in April, “is just that: it is discretionary for local authorities to come up with their own criteria. We want them to be innovative.”

“I have great personal sympathy with the point the baroness made. I am a great user of independent bookshops,” said Bourne. “One can think of many areas where bookshops are vital to a town, but that is something for the local authority to respond to. They can do that by being creative within their own scheme.”

Giles Clifton, head of corporate affairs at the Booksellers Association, said he was delighted to have seen the “fundamental issue for booksellers” highlighted by Rebuck in the Lords, but that “with 25% of high-street bookshops facing a business-rates increase of 10% or more, it is not good enough to simply state this is a matter for local government”.

“The danger is that for a significant proportion of the BA’s members, the increases seen in April are very high, and the government must address these concerns,” said Clifton. “There is a widespread view that the present business-rates system is out of date and fails to provide fairness. In particular, the gross distortion business rates imposed on bricks-and-mortar retailers means they are competing with one hand tied behind their backs against multinational online sellers such as Amazon.”

Put into action in April, the latest hike in business rates was more pronounced because of a controversial two-year delay on the nationwide evaluation of property that was due to take place in 2015. While the revaluation is likely to benefit struggling high streets in northern England, London will record an increase of around £9bn over the next five years.

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