Burnham offers 20% cut in business rates for pubs, clubs and live music in England – UK politics live

Chief secretary to the Treasury Emma Reynolds has insisted plans to cut business rates for hospitality venues are fully funded when put to her that the changes to rules for vape shops and online marketplaces due to pay for them are described as being in review and consultation.

She told Sky News:

This is fully funded, and it will be funded in a couple of major ways. Firstly, by looking at business rate reliefs on businesses that cause social harm, such as vape shops, and secondly by cracking down on those online businesses who are not paying VAT.

I am confident as chief secretary, having looked at the numbers, and we will set out the numbers in more detail at the budget, that we will fund this announcement in the ways that I’ve just mentioned.

There may be additional measures that we look at as well, but it is those two principal ways that we’re going to fund this business rate relief.

The worry has been, obviously, in recent years, I mean, when our venues from last year to this current year got revalued, we saw increases of between 100% and 150% on the rates that we pay.

So that just goes to show how much they went up by. And while 20% – particularly if that 20% is on top of the 15% and other help that’s there – that can be very meaningful for businesses, independent businesses such as mine; I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but the increases were so huge last year that now we’re sort of chipping away at some of those increases.

We’re not actually … getting better value than we had before. We’re still having to find extra money for these business rates. But you know, it is a relief that actually some of that is mitigated quickly. 20% isn’t an insignificant figure.