State's heavy weaponry is trained on businesses!

 

I admit it. I’m tired and frustrated with thugs and gangsters.

Not ones that directly cause physical arm, thank goodness!

But I am tired, as a small business owner and employer, of always having to swim upstream against a self-evidently stupid state. Frustrated because no-one, either in Government or who wants to be in Government, ever seems to want to challenge the state’s vested self-interest.

Of course, you will say – well go and do something else instead. Put a stop to your nearly 40-years in business. Close it down. Retire.

I’m tempted to do that. But not before I again explain to my long-suffering readers, many of whom are business people, or who at the very least know that without business people, why the bloated British state would burst open and wither like a ridiculous party balloon.

Everyone recognises – now and after appalling damage has been done – the role of a self-serving and unaccountable state in the Post Office scandal, an entity wholly-owned by the Government.

Its ongoing denial of its own mistakes and efforts to bully and crush innocent sub-postmasters (i.e. small businesspeople) is certainly one of the greatest injustices that the state has inflicted on its citizens in recent years.

My own experience of a monolithic, defensive and arrogant state (funded by us taxpayers in case we forget) is only slightly less traumatic.

As a result of the last round of business rates revaluations, my warehouse business faces a massive hike in its costs base – almost overnight.

It does this because the Valuation Office Agency (VOA) lazily assumes that my operation is comparable to that of a giant Amazon warehouse, or similar.

Therefore, as of this month, business rates will represent 12% of my annual sales turnover, or a quarter of my yearly wage bill! I feel like I’m working to feed the bloated, unaccountable, and inefficient state system at the cost of myself and prospective employees.

I won’t repeat my thoughts as to why the whole damn system is unfair and is perversely taxing inputs and not business outputs. Instead, let me take you through my thoughts on the maze of state-backed unfairness when I decided to appeal against this revaluation.

Firstly, what gives Government agencies, such as the VOA, the right to over-charge or over-assess a legitimate business, and then expect that business to have to appeal at their own cost, without recourse to compensation or expenses? 

Secondly, I believe that their excessive over-valuation of my, and other business premises, to be a vexatious attempt to bully businesses into paying-up. Business Rates Valuations are supposed to represent the open-market rent payable by the business in question, but the VOA ignores that basic principle. 

Yet, the  VOA, having conducted the most superficial desktop comparison – no site visits to ascertain exactly what we do – expects us to gather our resources and appeal. 

In short, this is pure gangsterism, with all the heavy weaponry held by the state and trained on us. 

The process itself is rigged. It allows just ONE chance to appeal the valuation – if you or your agent are unsuccessful, you will have to wait until the next valuation period in three or four-years’ time. 

And if you are successful, then much of the money saved is eaten away by your agents’ fees. They don’t come cheap. 

Furthermore, the state never likes to lose. There is a feeling around that if an appeal is successful and the state has lost out, then the business will be targeted even more sternly during the next valuation period. 

Such unreasonable behaviour is systemic across the state. 

As I was writing this column, I saw that Suffolk Chamber of Commerce had issued a report into R&D Tax Reliefs. 

In this case, it looks as if it’s His Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) that is doing the bullying. 

The report identifies that the lack of knowledgeable experts at the HMRC, plus the imposition of an overly strict compliance regime, is causing many legitimate companies’ most recent claims to be delayed and/or refused, with others fearful that previously successful claims from previous years might now be challenged.

Understandably, 46% of respondents to a Chamber survey are now deterred from making future claims based on their latest experience.

Sounds all too familiar to me. The state wants to squeeze money from us and make it as forbidding and painful as possible to argue for something fairer and sustainable.

And let’s not forget the army of self-employed citizens currently being threatened by HMRC with IR35 rules as to how how they run their businesses, with many having to fend-off costly and time-consuming retrospective claims for tax.

What will all those faceless and useless bureaucrats do when there are no businesses left to bully? I hate to think. 

Perhaps they’ll come after you next?

First published in the www.suffolkfreepress.co.uk on Thursday, 4th April 2024.

Councils need to deliver action

As published in the Suffolk Free Press, Thursday, June 28, 2018.

Recently, Suffolk County Council acquired both a new chief executive and a new leader. Nicola Beach and Cllr. Matthew Hicks will doubtless wish to use the opportunity afforded by their successful ascent of their respective managerial and political summits to pause and consider aspects of the County’s work. But I doubt the outcome will be anything revolutionary.

And that is a shame.

Because the relationship between their part of the public sector and Suffolk’s residents and business community remains fundamentally imbalanced.

As a resident of Suffolk, I’ve endured consultations upon consultations about local government reorganisations or the merger of one district with another over the last decade or so.

All such reforms are inherently inward-looking and more about preserving local councils’ slice of the cake rather than a serious consideration of what they should focus upon and what they should hand over to the private sector.

As a libertarian, I believe that individuals and families should have the maximum control over how they spend their income. I therefore question those parts of our council tax bills that are used to fund, directly or indirectly, things such as sports centres, wellbeing teams and community grants.

The first are always run better by the private sector, the second should be about individuals making well-informed decisions not being imposed upon by bureaucrats and the last surely is about taking less taxation out of people’s pockets in the first place! I could go on.

But an even more fundamental flaw is the lack of democratic accountability across councils in Suffolk in listening to and acting upon the interests of business.

Companies in Suffolk contribute millions of pounds each year to public services through business rates, yet they have no democratic voice as to how that is spent. 

At present, business taxes are collected locally, sent to local government and then redistributed back to the councils via a complex and arguably anti-democratic formula.

Because of that local councils have in most cases at best only paid lip service to the needs of the very wealth creators they partially rely on for their existence.

The saying ‘no taxation without representation’ sparked a revolution in another country and I certainly believe that businesses in Suffolk should have the ability to contribute to the democratic debate. In short, businesses should have the vote, with the number of votes dependent, say, on local turnover, tax contributions or workforce employed.

If councillors relied in part on the support of the business vote during election times, there might well be fewer anti-business practice between those times, not least as regards the expensive, slow-moving and archaic planning system!

Of course, the financial underpinnings of local government finance are being reformed. Significantly, councils will be able to retain additional business rates from new companies set up in their areas.

This means that councils’ funding will rely more and more upon the level of growth they facilitate. Some of them, including Forest Heath and Mid Suffolk District and St Edmundsbury Borough Councils have announced growth investment strategies aimed at them taking a stake in initiatives that have both an economic and a social return.

Potentially, this could be a trigger that changes their process-driven, bureaucratic cultures into something more aligned with the needs of us wealth creators. 

Yet we need to see these councils and others engaging more with businesses in delivering these investment opportunities – ideally having advisory boards made up of local entrepreneurs. 

And finally, surely it’s time that the Suffolk public sector actually adopted a more supportive role in terms of buying goods and services from Suffolk firms? A ‘buy Suffolk’ bias would do wonders for supporting our diverse business base.

I understand there is an initiative looking at this area. Let’s hope it delivers actions and not just warm words.

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