Responding to the appointment of Mel Stride MP as the new Chair of the Treasury Select Committee, Helen Dickinson, Chief Executive of the British Retail Consortium, said:

“We welcome the appointment of Mel Stride as the new Chair of the Treasury Select Committee and look forward to working with him in the coming months. The Committee has an important job to do in finalising its report on business rates and we hope the Committee loses no time in taking that forward. The new Chair arrives at an important moment, with last week's CPI announcement imposing another £137million to retailers' business rates bill from April 2020. 

"The current business rates system is fundamentally broken. Retailers, who account for 5% of the economy, pay 25% of all business rates. This is unsustainable, and holds back business investment and innovation. The British Retail Consortium is calling for the abolition of downwards transition - a system that costs retailers £1.3bn. As a result, many businesses are already paying substantially more than 50% of their rateable value in rates – and in some cases over 100%. No other tax requires those paying too much to subsidise those paying too little.”