A Permanent Small Business Rates Relief Scheme

Part of 3. Topical Questions – in the Senedd at 3:28 pm on 13 December 2017.

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Photo of Mr Neil Hamilton Mr Neil Hamilton UKIP 3:28, 13 December 2017

Will the Cabinet Secretary agree with me that when you have to provide a multiplicity of reliefs and exemptions, it's generally speaking a sign of a bad tax? Whilst the measures that have been announced yesterday are certainly very welcome, they don't actually get to the heart of the problem. Additional support for the childcare sector affects 100 businesses out of nearly 4,400 and for local authorities, £1.3 million divided between 22 means less than £60,000 per authority. There will still be, as Nick Ramsay pointed out a moment ago, lots of small businesses in Wales that will be suffering as a result of the existing system, and any tax that is unrelated to the ability to pay is bound to produce these kinds of anomalies. I take what the Cabinet Secretary said about the Barclay review in Scotland and ways in which we may be able to tweak the existing system, but either we go to a system where we exempt a much larger number of businesses or we design a new tax altogether that removes some of the more objectionable elements of the current tax. I appreciate that that's a long-term solution to the problem, but would the Cabinet Secretary at least commit himself to looking at the possibility of having a better type of tax to tax businesses, which is more related to ability to pay than the existing model, which, as we know, having been in existence for a very, very long time, regularly produces the problems with which he has to grapple today?