Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Finance and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:08 pm on 13 October 2021.
Thank you for raising that issue this afternoon. There are a number of ways in which we communicate directly with businesses. One is through Business Wales, which has an excellent database of businesses here in Wales, so we're able to get information to them very rapidly and that was extremely useful to us during the pandemic. And, of course, all businesses that are subject to non-domestic rates will be on the local register of their councils, which should, again, be a useful way to share information. And again, that was extremely useful to us during the course of the pandemic when we were able to get grants to businesses very, very rapidly indeed.
In terms of the future of business rates, I think that much depends on the outcome of the fundamental review and what that will mean for us here in Wales. Business rates here provide around £1 billion of our Welsh budget, so this is a significant amount of money, so we need to be thinking, in any kind of review of business rates, what the implications would be for public spending. I did have an excellent meeting yesterday with the Welsh Retail Consortium and they were able to talk quite passionately about the potential ways in which business rates could change to maybe further recognise investment in decarbonisation, for example. There were lots of ideas that they able to share with us, which were all very interesting. I don't have a road map for any changes today, but I'm keen to hear ideas as to what might improve the situation in the future.