The majority of employees are employed in small and medium-sized businesses. The business owners are usually from, or are living near, the community they trade with. Their interest in seeing a sustainable town centre is personal as well as professional, and profits, unlike those of Amazon, Tesco, Asda and the others, are far more likely to stay in the local community rather than be sent to some remote parent company in another country. Since the profits stay in the country, those businesses will be paying their fair share of UK tax, unlike some multinationals.

The current system taxes businesspeople on the basis of the nominal value of their property. This is illogical and focuses on buildings as opposed to the business that operates from them. It seems to forget that behind any small business is a person or people trying to make a living. It’s a regressive tax, and its change to a more progressive model is well overdue, as the empty properties on many high streets in Wales and the comparatively fewer SMEs in Wales illustrate.

Devolution of business rates to Wales enables Wales to take the lead on introducing a progressive and fairer system of business rates. I would like to see business rates based on profit or turnover, with incentives built in so that employers share the benefit of reductions in business rates with employees, in the form of employing more people. For example, business rates could be restructured in such a way that businesses receive a discount or concessionary rate for employing more people. Conditions could be set on the discounts to encourage businesses to employ people at a wage higher than the national minimum. It just needs a little bit of creative thinking here.

For those who claim that such a system would be complicated to administer, they may be right, but this is about the best way to support businesses and pay for local services. I really do believe that where there’s a will, there’s a way, and to stimulate the growth of local economies with a fairer local taxation system, the extra administration that may be caused is well worth it. Before a business starts trading, and before they have earned a single penny through the business, they’re saddled with a big business rates bill. The business rates regime disincentivises business start-ups, and makes life for young businesses more difficult at a time when they need some space in which to grow, turn a profit and start employing people.

I note the Welsh Government’s amendments to our motion, and I’d like to make the following points. Your amendments make much of your support for small businesses, but as long as you continue to stand idly by and allow local authorities to wreck high streets and the local economy by making it harder and more expensive to do business there, your assertions regarding support for small businesses will continue to ring as hollow as they have for the last 20 years. It is all very well to introduce rates relief, but businesses need to be able to plan and budget, which this ad hoc scenario we have at present doesn’t allow.