Statement on business rates cut: a welcome first step, but businesses need more

Nearly 32,000 pubs, clubs and live music venues are getting a 20% cut to their business rates. While this is welcome, it doesn’t address the litany of issues many spaces face and offers little detail on what constitutes a large venue. 

Andy Burnham says he's changing things after years of "boarded up windows and for sale signs”. John Healey says pubs and venues are the heart of communities. There's a photo of the PM somewhere holding a pint, probably.

A 20% cut to business rates is significant. I'm not going to pretend it isn't, or pretend the people announcing it don't mean it. It’s great to see this straight off the bat from the new PM, even if businesses won’t see the saving until next year. 

But I've spent 20 years watching venues in this city close, and none of them closed because of business rates alone. 

They close because of their VAT bill, or because their security bill doubles after an incident nobody could have prevented. They close because an insurance premium jumps for reasons no one explains, a licensing condition from years back is still on the certificate long after the problem it addressed has gone away, because a neighbour doesn’t want a pub on their doorstep or the freehold is sold to someone who's never stepped foot inside. Rates are one line on a spreadsheet that has 40 lines, and most of the other 39 are worse.

When I read that this is ‘just one step’ and the real reform of the business rates system is coming in next year’s Budget, I believe them. I know that's what governments have been saying about nightlife for as long as I've been in it. There's always a bigger commitment a few months out. The London Nightlife Taskforce report, which I served as the project lead, has 20 recommendations across 10 areas. Most governments manage about one of them a year, if that, and the one they manage is always the one that photographs well.

The announcement also takes a cheap shot at large music venues, which it says are excluded from the discount, with the detail to follow in the Budget. Those are the venues that carry a scene; the mid-size rooms that break new acts and subsidise the smaller ones underneath them just by staying open and pulling people through a city. Nobody's told us yet where that line is drawn. 

And it's being paid for by ‘reviewing reliefs’ for businesses judged not to be a positive contribution to communities — vape shops, apparently. I don't have any love for vape shops, but I notice how easily this government reaches for that move: fund culture by punishing something else it’s already decided is disreputable, rather than deciding culture is worth funding on its own terms. It's a tell - and it’s telling too that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is nowhere to be seen in this announcement. It comes from the Treasury, the business department, and Number 10. Pubs and live music are being talked about as high street retail, not as the places that make our communities feel like communities, which is exactly the mindset I've spent my working life trying to shift.

I’ve watched too many of these announcements land as the whole story when they were always meant to be the opening line. The cut will matter to many, but it should be a down payment on a radical redrawing of the support we show and the value we place on our venues. 

Cllr Sam Mathys, Hackney Council Cabinet Member for Culture, Nightlife, Resilience and Business Standards