>Business rates must be slashed to help shops survive. Their payments dwarf those on Amazon’s warehouses.
That would leave local authorities incredibly underfunded - they get a huge amount of their income from business rates.
Perhaps we need to look again at what business rates are based on. Currently it's rental value. This puts reailers at a disadvantage as the rental value of High Street premises is much higher than the rental vale of an Amazon warehous located on an out of town industrial estate. Yet, in fact, an Amazon warehouse is acting more like a retailer than a warehouser - they have employees working in their warehouses, for instance, just as retail premises have sales assistants. Amazon's employees are selectors/packers, but they're not warehousemen in the traditional understanding of a man and his forklift moving goods.
We need a different metric from rental value on which to base buisiness rates for Amazon and the like. One that doesn't give them such a huge advantage over the High Street retailer.