THE man who is heading up the examination of Scotland’s commercial rates system has named the members of his team and has asked businesses to give him their ideas for reform by October.
Ken Barclay, the former chair of RBS Scotland, was announced as the person to lead the Scottish Government’s review of business rates when first minister Nicola Sturgeon spoke to the Federation of Small Businesses conference in Glasgow earlier this year.
He’s been asked to consider how business rates might better support business growth, respond to wider economic conditions and changing marketplaces and support long-term growth and investment. The review should be completed in 2017.
Now Barclay has announced who will be on the rates review team. They include Isobel d’Inverno of law firm Brodies, Nora Senior of communications company Weber Shandwick, and Professor Russel Griggs, chairman of the Scottish government’s regulatory review group.
“Our aim is to bring forward recommendations that seek to enhance and reform the system to better support business growth and reflect changing marketplaces whilst still maintaining the level of income necessary to provide funding for services upon which businesses rely,” Barclay said.
“I would urge all businesses to make their views known on the way forward for our rates system.”
Responding to the announcement David Lonsdale, director of the Scottish Retail Consortium said: “The Barclay Review heralds a great opportunity to recast business rates for the decades ahead and deliver a modern, sustainable and competitive rates system in Scotland.”
The Consortium has argued hard for rates reform in recent years.
At its recent MSPs reception SRC chairman Andrew Murphy told Holyrood parliamentarians that “an anachronistic business rates system” was part of a cumulative burden of employment and tax laws that was having a damaging effect on retail businesses.
“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 that rely on property and people,” he said.
