Metro, Friday 24 July 2026
Prime minister Andy Burnham has announced a 20% cut in business rates for pubs, clubs and some music venues in England from April, on top of a 15% cut already made in January. Visiting The Hare pub in Harlow, Essex, he said pubs "are, to me, our heritage," adding that "once pubs are gone, they don't come back." The cut is to be funded by stripping business rate relief from firms Burnham says "do social harm," naming adult gaming centres and vape shops as bringing "real harm to communities" without adding much to community life. Industry reaction was mixed: the British Beer and Pub Association said it was "delighted," while JD Wetherspoon's Tim Martin, who runs 824 venues, called it "small," and hotel owner Steve Perez said rates had risen around 130% for his business regardless. A think tank, Good Growth Foundation, is separately calling on Burnham to go further and create protected "cultural districts" for venues.
Notice what is actually being decided here, and by whom. Burnham has not proposed a general test for which businesses deserve rate relief and which don't. He has named two categories, pubs and clubs on one side, adult gaming centres and vape shops on the other, and moved money from one to the other on the strength of his own account of which does "social harm." There is no published threshold for social harm, no criteria a business could meet or fail, just a prime minister's judgement about which forms of commerce are heritage and which are merely tolerated.
That judgement may well be one most readers share. Vape shops and gaming centres are easy targets, and pubs make for good photographs. But the mechanism is worth separating from the target. What Burnham has demonstrated is that the tax and relief system can be reshaped, quickly and without new legislation debated on its own merits, according to which businesses a government currently favours. Today it is vape shops losing out to pubs. The system that allows that reallocation does not itself contain any reason it could not run in the other direction, or be pointed at a different pair of categories entirely, the next time a different administration decides which businesses count as heritage and which count as harm.
Tim Martin's complaint that the cut is "small" and Steve Perez's point that rates have risen regardless are both, in their way, beside the point this book keeps returning to. The size of the relief is a negotiating detail. The existence of a mechanism that lets government sort lawful businesses into deserving and undeserving categories, on criteria that exist nowhere except in a minister's stated preference, is the more durable fact, and it will still be there long after this particular rate cut is forgotten.
The same mechanism, official framing standing in for a fixed test, appears again in today's entry on Sadiq Khan's dispute with Nigel Farage over London's crime figures, where the disagreement is not really about the underlying statistics but about whose account of what the statistics mean gets treated as the default one.
This entry shows a state deciding, without a fixed test or published criteria, which categories of lawful business deserve support and which deserve to fund it, and calling the resulting transfer a policy rather than a judgement.