Sunday 8 March 2009

Less Tax and Less Paperwork for small businesses

Laura Sandys press release

The Conservatives has pledged to cut taxes and paperwork for small shops and small firms to help them survive the recession.

The Shadow Communities & Local Government Secretary promised a Conservative Government would ensure small business rate relief was applied automatically to firms, rather than businesses having to claim it themselves.

Currently, firms have to fill out time-consuming paperwork to claim rate relief, despite the fact that Whitehall’s tax inspectors know precisely which firms would be eligible. The Local Government Association has estimated that less than half of the 870,000 firms eligible for the rebate have claimed the money.

“Gordon Brown is making it difficult for small firms to claim the tax relief to which they are entitled. He is compounding their misery by finding new ways to drive up business rates by stealth.”

And she promised, “Conservatives would ensure that small firms automatically receive rate relief, cutting their paperwork and their tax bills and giving many of them a fighting chance to stay afloat (during the recession).”


The Conservative MP, Peter Luff, has put forward a Private Members' Bill to get rate relief applied automatically for small firms.

1 comment:

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.