James Browne, a senior policy adviser for the Tony Blair Institute, says business rates hikes spark predictable crises and temporary relief schemes that are costly and destabilising. While tenants feel the pain upfront, economic evidence shows that in the long run higher or lower business rates are actually felt by landlords through rent adjustments. He warns that constant revaluations and stop-gap reliefs miss this reality and distract businesses from investing and growing. Mr Browne argues that a better solution would be to shift formal responsibility for business rates from tenants to landlords, reducing uncertainty, administrative burden, and costs for local authorities. More ambitiously, he suggests that business rates should be replaced with a land-value–based tax on commercial landowners, which would stop penalising property improvements and encourage investment.
