3. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. Will the Cabinet Secretary make a statement on the level of business rates in Wales, please? OAQ52899

I thank the Member for that question. The level of non-domestic rates in Wales has not risen in real terms over the past decade. Over the same period, the rates relief provided by the Welsh Government has more than doubled. 

Thank you very much for the reply, Cabinet Secretary. Welsh retailers already pay a quarter of all Welsh business rates and it is becoming increasingly expensive to operate from property. The Welsh Retail Consortium has projected that over a fifth of shops could be lost as the next decade progresses. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, in his recent autumn budget, made money available to cut business rates for retailers with a rateable value of under £51,000, reducing their bills by a third for two years. Will the Cabinet Secretary consider introducing a similar measure to support the Welsh retail industry and reverse the trend in shop closures on our high streets and all over Wales, please?

Well, I thank the Member for the question, which is a very proper question. I said in my answer to Nick Ramsay that I am looking carefully at how we can use the consequential that we have had to support small businesses in Wales, even as Mr Ramsay appeared to suggest that I ought to be giving it to local government.

But the £26 million that we have received for this purpose—let me just clarify a few points for the Member. First of all, we now understand that, whereas the Chancellor announced that this was a two-year scheme, he has only provided a one-year consequential for us in Wales. We know it's £26 million next year. We've got no figure for the year after.

And it turns out that the scheme that the Chancellor advertised in his budget speech is not a national scheme at all. What is now clear to us is that he is relying entirely on the discretionary powers of local government to implement his scheme. So, it will be for every local authority in England to decide whether or not to use the money that they will get from this scheme for this purpose.

We don't need to mirror what is going on in England, because we already have a high street relief scheme here in Wales, which they don't have in England. We introduced it the year before last in discussion with the leader of Plaid Cymru, Adam Price, where we agreed on the joint parameters of the high street relief scheme in Wales. We've continued it this year. I hope, using the consequential for next year, that we will be able to make it more generous for businesses in Wales than we've been able to hitherto. We will design a scheme that meets the size, the distribution and the value of the non-domestic rates base in Wales, which is different to that in England, to make sure that the money goes to the places where it is most urgently needed.

Cabinet Secretary, the high street, so-called, in many of our isolated communities in our Valleys or our rural areas may only consist of a single retail premises. That single shop, actually, is the lifeline for many communities, especially if public transport disappears after 5 o'clock in the evening. Will you consider looking at the opportunities you can provide for relief for those types of businesses, which, without that relief, may lose the income they have and basically end up in debt and consequently shut down? They are a lifeline to those communities. If there's no bus transportation, people can't go anywhere else and they can't get at those needs there.

Well, Llywydd, the Member makes a very important point and he gets right to the heart of what is, I think, one of the weaknesses of our current scheme, 75 per cent of Welsh businesses benefit from small business rate relief here in Wales, 50 per cent of them pay no small business rates at all—they get it whether that sum of money is necessary to their business or not. There is no test in the system that we have, or indeed in any part of the United Kingdom, as to whether or not that money is doing real good in that business. The point that David Rees is making is whether or not we ought to consider, in the way we distribute the money, whether we should put more money in the hands of those businesses for whom this relief is genuinely making a difference to their survival or not.

There's been work in Northern Ireland and in Scotland on this. I think it's a sensible idea. It's difficult to bring off because of the scheme that we have inherited, but it's a scheme that indiscriminately provides help to those who need it and those who don't. You could say it's not the very best use of public money when we know that there are some parts of the high street in some communities where the help that we could offer through the scheme, if it was more targeted on those who really needed it, would go further to sustain businesses in some very disadvantaged parts of Wales.