We need your help urgently, but the good news is we want you to do absolutely nothing.
I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that retail and hospitality have been utterly devastated since the C-word arrived, but I’ll tell you anyway. Only the richest stores will survive, only restaurants with serious cash in the bank will make it through. Hundreds of thousands of our shops, bars, pubs, clubs and restaurants will never reopen I’m afraid, but by doing absolutely nothing you can save them.
The truth is, the pandemic has hurried along the inevitable. It has reached into the future, grabbed it around its stupid, skinny neck and dragged it kicking and screaming right onto the doorstep of number ten. But don’t worry, I have the solution.
I don’t have to spell it out but, sod it, I will: The economy is like a giant flashy wristwatch: an incredibly complex but highly sensitive mechanism that’s taken centuries to find its natural rhythm. Some of it runs fast and smooth while other bits clunk along reluctantly, but when it’s working it interconnects every single one of us so that the girl that bakes the bread for the sandwiches that feed the railway workers that get the trains rolling that take commuters to their offices to design and make the stuff they sell in the shops to enable our lovely baker to buy the things she needs to keep her life ticking along nicely. Well, that’s the idea anyway.
But over the last few years, with each new regulation, with each incremental increase in rent and rates, we could only respond by passing on the extra costs to our increasingly bewildered customers. There’s a clue something’s going awry when it costs the best part of five quid for a basic double decaf latte with mocha sprinkles.
On top of all this, national chains with hilariously ambitious spreadsheets often paid above market rents, which in turn hiked the prices for the rest of us. Increased rents meant increased business rates and so click by click the delicate mechanism was ratcheted tighter and tighter until…well, you know what happened.
(By the way, when you next bump into Rishi please thank him for all his help. Getting paid to watch movies for a year was a bit of a novelty at first, but now everyone’s completed Netflix, frankly we’re bored witless.)
Please don’t think this is a plea from a special interest group or a specific corner of the market whining for extra help. No. Our high streets, our shops and restaurants are the lifeblood of everybody’s community. No one will be unaffected by the retail apocalypse when the shockwave hits later this year. Reality bites and this time it will leave a fatal wound, for sure.
Look, I get it. I get that you need to increase taxes. I even get that we don’t really have to balance the books like a household budget because it’s more important to show a decent long term credit record. (Otherwise what sort of a madman would spend £100 billion on HS2??) I also understand it’s all about legacy, but here’s the thing, we’re at a crossroads now Boris. Continue where we left off in March 2020 and you will be remembered as the PM who ushered in the era of the ghost town, the tumbleweed community, the lost generation…you get my drift. You enjoyed the taxes when times were good but, let’s be honest, taxes are brakes on growth. And no sane person could believe our communities need slowing down right now.
That’s why I’m asking you to do nothing: Abolish business rates, simple as that. Stop the clipboard army of surveyors and measurers, calculators, adjusters and valuers. Stop the rate reviews, rate review delays and banish the rate collectors. (The cost of the admin-mechanism must be…well, hundreds of millions alone). Imagine, bringing an end to the endless fighting, disputing, negotiating and renegotiating, all of it solved overnight. By you.
And please don’t consider rates holidays or strategic delays to our punishment. Telling a child you won’t slap it until next year does not make for a well balanced upbringing.
Boris, simply remove your foot from our collective necks, stand back and fold your arms as the whoosh of energy tousles your iconic mop. Oh yes, it will be instant. Watch as our lungs balloon with oxygen, our eyes snap open and the entrepreneur in us awakens, alive with the long forgotten electricity of enthusiasm. No longer will our towns feel locked down by the likes of Costa and WH Smith. Given the chance we shall reclaim them. Our children and our children’s children will once again grow up knowing that their local high street really is theirs, and that one day they may bring their own ideas to market.
Unlocking our nation of shopkeepers Boris, this should be your legacy. Unleashing the army, not of taxers, naysayers, measurers and restricters, but the gargantuan hidden army of muffin makers, cake bakers and dressmakers, the sandwich toasters, chicken roasters, electronic fixers, baristas and cocktail mixers alongside specialists in house cleaning, dog preening and bao bun steaming. These people, these are the good people that will get the arteries of Britain pumping again, and only you can make it happen.
Do nothing Boris, that’s what we want. Nothing is more important right now.
These images of closed and shuttered shops and restaurants were taken on the anniversary of our first lockdown, in Kensington, Chelsea and Soho, the UK’s wealthiest postcodes.
Follow me on Twitter @retailfuturist for daily insights and wry musings.
