Part of 1. 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government – in the Senedd at 1:39 pm on 21 September 2016.
I’m not sure whether this is Orwellian or Kafkaesque, but it doesn’t make any sense to me. You’re paying exactly the same taxes; it’s only a tax cut in Wales apparently now. There are other things that you as Cabinet Secretary could have done to support businesses in terms of rates. You could have indexed the business rate multiplier to the consumer prices index rather than the retail prices index in order to ensure more accurate rate bills and avoid businesses suffering from declining income. You could have actually introduced a double multiplier, a dual multiplier, reflecting the difference in terms of large businesses and small businesses as they have done in Scotland and England. Why didn’t you do that, Cabinet Secretary?