And SRC chairman Andrew Murphy took the opportunity to detail what the organisation sees as the major contribution the retail industry makes to Scotland and to lobby for economic and tax policies it reckons would help the sector survive and prosper in a changing business environment.
“We are the largest private sector employer, providing jobs to over a quarter of a million people,” he said.
“We are a sector which is dynamic, 13% of all new businesses in Scotland last year were retailers. And we have an enormous impact beyond our shops.
“However, away from the front of the store there are enormous structural changes affecting the industry.
“We have now seen consistent deflation in the grocery market for two years. Deflation is not a new phenomenon for high street retailers. However, whilst in non-food customers will often use the savings to buy more televisions or t-shirts, the same is not necessarily true with groceries. We have had to adjust to customers focusing on value and becoming highly price-sensitive. Minister, I suspect this is something your colleague – the finance secretary – will become increasingly alive to when deliberating over the right rates of personal taxation in the months ahead. The best outcome for retailers, households and the economy, is for tax rates for the vast majority of people to be at least the same north and south of the border,” he said.
“In the coming years we’ll see fewer people employed in shops and more in warehousing, head offices and distribution. Retailers will operate from fewer stores employing fewer people with our focus very much on the learning agility and technological skills of that workforce.
“There is a third factor also affecting our industry, a challenging public policy agenda.
“The cumulative burden of the National Living Wage, the upcoming Apprenticeship Levy, and an anachronistic business rates system, is having a disproportionate and damaging effect on businesses which have always been operated on low margins.
“These costs are placing question marks over commercial investment, jobs, the viability of many High Streets, and traditional business models.
“If investment in town centres and in jobs are important, then there needs to be a move away from a tax system that extracts disproportionately from businesses who rely on property and people.”
