Never-ending rent hikes for shops to be banned to help save high street
Never-ending rent hikes for shops to be banned to help save high street
Posted by OldGuto
Never-ending rent hikes for shops to be banned to help save high street
Never-ending rent hikes for shops to be banned to help save high street
Posted by OldGuto
14 Comments
Can people also gain from the idea of controlling rents? Or his rent control, only suitable for nostalgia driven policies?
It’s not rent, it’s business rates. Landlords would rather have their properties occupied rather than unoccupied because some rent is better than none, and if the property is unoccupied then the landlord is liable for the business rates.
The problem is that business rates are so insanely high that even if landlords offer very little rent (or sometimes zero rent in some cases) it’s still not possible for a legitimate business to be economically viable.
In lots of prime locations (like Oxford Street in London), businesses rates are so high that a lot of the time landlords will let out their properties for literally zero rent or close to zero rent just so they have someone to pay the businesses rates, and even that isn’t enough for legitimate businesses, which is why lots of dodgy ones have been moving in.
>When flagship buildings were left empty, landlords gave them over to the candy stores. The idea was the gaudy shops would move in for free as long as they paid the business rates, which in many cases never happened.
https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/oxford-street-candy-shop-investigation-b1082733.html
Well are they going to relax the rules on commercial lending rules?
Pension portfolios rely on those rent based valuations.
Sadly the High Street is doomed.Theres always Amazon’s vans buzzing orders to your door in less than 12 hours now days.
I find it odd that people moan about the highstreets dying whilst at the same time pushing most of their potential users to out of town shopping parks and malls.
The problem is _always_ taxes. The unending need for government to feed itself on the wealth created by people kills all wealth creation.
High street needs to be fundamentally changed and married to a better public services offering: cyber cafes, community youth centres, early education centres. Bring things that are cheap and or free to the high street.
The 9-5 business work week doesn’t make sense anymore now that mom and dad are both at work, neither do a lot of stores that can’t compete with the machine that is amazon. So do something useful with the space that attracts people.
Someone else gave the explanation as to why it’s business rates not rent that’s the issue.
To combat, why not decrease business rates and introduce an equivalent for online sites. All websites keep track of how many people visit the site, introduce a tax on that. It would function effectively the same as nice spots in reality for a shop to exist. In places where you’re highly likely to have customers the business rates are higher and so sites that have more visitors are also more likely to make sales and so we can decrease the business rate tax a bit and replace some of it with a website visitor tax.
This isn’t going to go down well. A lot of very large investors (including pension funds) rely on certainty that rents won’t go down. Landlords will insist on fixed stepped rents instead, which won’t be popular with tenants.
Commercial landlords are already taking a pounding. They got absolutely bummed by covid (prohibitions on recovering arrears or evicting tenants, and then compelled to mediate what a fair payment of arrears might be).
They got screwed by changes to insolvency rules where tenants in insolvency can refuse to pay but landlords can’t evict them (unlike every other supplier who can just refuse to deal with them).
High street landlords got screwed by recent rules which can force them to repair buildings and let them out if they are not in use.
And if a landlords premises get tagged as an asset of community value, they can’t sell the bloody thing for 6 months (soon to be 12 months) while the community tries to raise funds on a right of first refusal. So they can’t even get out of the game easily if they want to!
Personally for my home town the town centre died off when they decided to pedestrianise the main street. It’s a small town so it’s not a case of being too busy. But people didn’t want to part with their cars and now they’ve lost to out of town shopping centers
Too late, all the good stuff is gone. It’s charity, vape shops and Turkish barbers all the way down now.
Rates is the issue. Businesses look at the overall cost of premises and not the breakdown. Commercial rents as a yield are not that high. But the rates can double the cost. That’s a huge issue
I still enjoy going to high street but the lack of parking and teh charge definitely kill it for me. In Greenwich they charge 7 bloody pound per house to park!
If a council is serious about improving high streets there is so much they can do beyond meddling with leasehold contracts agreed upon by two commercial parties. These are not residential tenancies, they are commercial contracts between two commercial entities.
If they want to encourage people to high streets, they can improvise parking & transport concerms by offer free or reduced parking, particularly during key shopping periods (Christmas, weekends, etc.). Basic infrastructure streetscape improvements like better lighting (partially important in winter months), benches, planting, public art, and cleans streets ect. Perhaps most importantly long terms actually use there planning powers to benefit highsreets long term and restrict change-of-use that harms the high street. Too many betting shops, estate agents and charity shops will kill a high street dead over time. Further they can be more proactive in actually promoting high street they want to protect with organise or granting permission for regular events like farmers markets, season festivals, late shopping evenings, etc. Basically just encourage people out to the high street.
This is all fairly basics but also involves councils being more proactive as well as requiring expenditure so instead meddling with agreed upon commercial contracts whilst maintaining and increasing business rates is the path they want to choose. Go figure.