Treasury admits 7,000 pubs corporations will see enterprise charges invoice DOUBLE after botched Budget reform

Nearly 7,000 high street firms will see their business rates bill more than double under Labour’s botched reforms, the Treasury admitted yesterday.

Dan Tomlinson, a Treasury minister, said around 1 per cent of the UK’s 767,000 retail, hospitality and leisure firms would be hit by the staggering increases following the Budget.

The Mail understands that the precise figure is just under 7,000.

But in a grilling by members of the Treasury select committee, Mr Tomlinson denied the suggestion by Tory MP Harriett Baldwin that the changes – which prompted angry landlords to bar Labour MPs from 1,500 pubs – had been a ‘political disaster’.

And he pushed back against pleas for more help for beleaguered firms – after a partial U-turn last month delivering £300 million of temporary help to pubs but not hotels, shops and restaurants was branded ‘too little, too late’.

Thousands of firms, including pubs, will see their business rates double 

Business rates raise £34 billion a year for the government, he told MPs.

‘That would be my word of warning to politicians who say that they can flick a switch and suddenly have £34 billion of revenue disappear from the tax system,’ Mr Tomlinson said.

Labour’s botched reforms to the system have sparked fury among small businesses especially after Chancellor Rachel Reeves raised their hopes in the Budget – when she said she was introducing permanently lower tax rates for high street firms plus a £4.3 billion package of support.

But many firms found that instead of falling, their rates bills were going up sharply thanks to the winding down of Covid-era support and the revaluation of business properties by tax officials – changes that the Budget speech did not dwell on.

The increases have piled more pressure on firms already being battered by Labour’s employer national insurance raid, steep rises in the minimum wage, and workers’ rights plans, as well as soaring energy bills.

Yesterday, Mr Tomlinson admitted that Ms Reeves could have handled the announcement better.

‘In hindsight, should the Chancellor have spent many, many minutes rather than a few sentences on business rates? Potentially,’ he said.

Mr Tomlinson tried to play down the impact of the changes by saying: ‘There are only one per cent of retail, hospitality and leisure properties who are seeing their bill go up by more than 100 per cent this year.’It implies that many thousands of others are also seeing huge increases that fall short of that.

Mr Tomlinson was challenged by MPs during yesterday’s hearing about steep hikes faced by firms in their constituencies.

But he said: ‘We have to design the system as a whole for the changes that are taking place across the whole country and every business.

‘If we were to introduce changes to the system that were to protect business like that from seeing any increases, the additional cost, the additional borrowing that the government would have to do would be quite significant.’Tory business spokesman Andrew Griffith said: ‘Dan needs to get out more if he doesn’t see that his business rates policy is both an economic and political disaster.

‘Businesses are bleeding out and he seems to have the sensitivity of an amoeba.’Helen Dickinson, chief executive of the British Retail Consortium, said the business rates system was ‘broken’ and in need of ‘root and branch reform’.

She added: ‘It must now be abundantly clear that the system is simply not fit for purpose.’