MPs urge major reforms to rescue UK's high streets

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Feb 21, 2019

A committee of UK MPs wants the British government to introduce taxes on e-tail sales, deliveries or packaging and also to reduce the property tax burden for stores in order to boost the country’s ailing high streets.

The housing communities and local government committee issued a report on Thursday saying that local councils need help to regenerate their local high streets and that help means cold, hard cash to allow them to redevelop town centres.

But redevelopment doesn’t mean changing their character too much as the committee also wants planning rules to be looked at so developers can’t convert commercial premises into flats without special permission. But that’s a suggestion that could meet opposition as the government tries to prove its commitment to meeting the UK’s chronic housing shortage.

Committee chairman Clive Betts admitted that “the heyday of the high street primarily as a retail hub is at an end”. But that doesn’t mean assuming that retailers will abandon high streets. Instead, there should be “a long-term strategy for renewal, reconfiguring the town centre and finding new ways of using buildings and encouraging new independent retailers.”

He also said local taxes that mean those with physical retail spaces pay more were “stacking the odds against businesses with a high street presence and this must end”.

He called for tax reforms to create a “level playing field between online and high street retailers, and we urge the government to investigate all the options in this area, including an online sales tax.”