Business Rates for High Street Independents Have More Than Doubled in One Year

The average business rate was £3,500. It is now £8,500. In one year.

That is not a typo and it is not a rounding error. That is the cost a small independent business pays just to exist on the high street, before a butcher has lifted a knife or a pub has pulled a pint. More than double. In twelve months.

And this is landing at the worst possible moment. Energy bills are up. Electricity is up. The cost of goods is up. Every input these businesses rely on is moving in the wrong direction at the same time. The business rate is the bill you pay before you have traded a single pound. It is the cover charge for being on the high street at all. When that number goes from £3,500 to £8,500 in a single year, you have removed the margin that was keeping some of these places alive.

Think about the butcher who is up at five. He has not sold you anything yet. He has not turned the lights on, not unlocked the cabinet, not sharpened a thing. He already owes £8,500 for the privilege of being there. Then add his energy bill. Then add what his suppliers are charging him now versus eighteen months ago. The steak has to carry all of that.

A pub is in the same position. Every pint poured is already weighted down by rates, rent, energy and cost of goods before a single penny of profit is considered. When the fixed costs double, the margins that were thin become margins that are gone.

I do not want a high street full of Poundlands. I do not want a high street full of Costas. I want the high street that the woman who remortgaged her house built, and the butcher who has been there for thirty years, and the independent café that knows your order. Those places exist in every country that has managed to hold onto a sense of place. We are losing ours, quietly, one set of accounts at a time.

The mechanism here is not dramatic. Nobody is bulldozing anything. The business rates just go up, the numbers stop working, and one morning the shutters do not go back up. That is how it happens.

If you know an independent on your high street that is carrying this right now, tell them about keepthemopen.com. There is a submission form. We want to hear from them.