this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago (2 children)

My pie in the sky dream would be for councils to buy high street shops, land and all, and rent them back with rent caps to small business owners. No more sky high business rates to worry about. Encourage small and medium size businesses to set up and grow their business up to a certain amount of turnover a year. Maybe that might reverse the trend in businesses abandoning the high street because there's no customers and customers abandoning the high street because the prices are sky high?

But who am I fooling? I live in Bristol and what we need is the council to fund building of a mega arena not even inside Bristol 🤷.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Councils are going bankrupt because they can't even run their own business. Letting them be landlords also is a recipe for disaster.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

I did say it was a pie in the sky dream 😂

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Not just the high street but also high density housing around as its the most valuable land in the city.

But I think it should all be done at market rate. Set a target of say 95% occupation and set the rate at that. If it's 0 or if it's 1,000,000 then so be it. The money can get returned to the town. Maybe have some alterations to this. Like 5 year contracts and if you renew you get a discount.

Land value tax is the closest we have to this and thankfully Wales is bringing it in. Its a very good system.