Part of 3. Topical Questions – in the Senedd at 3:26 pm on 13 December 2017.
Cabinet Secretary, I've also been perusing yesterday's written statement and a permanent business rates relief scheme of the type you've identified was desperately needed, so we welcome the permanence of the new scheme. I've raised over the last months—and years, probably, now—some of the problems that small businesses, particularly high-street businesses in my constituency in Monmouth and Chepstow, have been facing with some of the extraordinary hikes in business rates that they've experienced. I know that that was out of your control in many ways, but the relief scheme that you implement is within your control.
As you said in answer to the last question, you are able to frame that so that it does meet Welsh needs and the Welsh context. I do share Adam Price's concern that this new scheme doesn't tick all the boxes and there will be notspots, so to speak, out in towns and high streets, particularly in my constituency, and pockets elsewhere. Will you at least undertake that you will keep the new system under review, so permanent it may be, but intransigent and inflexible it won't be, and, in the future, if you do get advice that it needs to be altered and amended that you will do that as soon as possible?