Each time I’m sitting at the traffic lights at the bottom of Parliament Street, with the former Rhodes Wood shop standing empty on one side and the still-empty Viper Rooms on the other (where I spent my stag do the night before my wedding), I find myself watching Harrogate’s visitors.
You can spot them easily enough. Lanyards around their necks, escapees from a conference, they emerge from the Convention Centre looking for a coffee, a pint or a bit of shopping.
As they attempt to navigate what must be North Yorkshire’s most hostile junction, I see their optimism fade. Traffic roars past, the takeaways dominate, and the former Rhodes Wood shop — once the most Harrogate thing about this corner of town — now stands empty.
Welcome to Harrogate.
The loss of Rhodes Wood — surely second only to Bettys in Harrogate icon status — removed the last vestiges of genteelness from this corner of town. Its move to larger premises may have been a triumph for the business, but it did our most important gateway no favours.
Sitting there in my car, I can almost see the visitors thinking:
“Is this it?”
So I need to talk about empty shops and business rates.
Having run businesses in Harrogate for 14 years, I know a thing or two about business rates.
Some years ago, when one of my businesses began to grow, we moved into slightly larger premises in Princes Square. The rent was perfectly reasonable (as most commercial rents are in town).
Then came business rates.
Like many first-time business owners, I received a stack of paperwork from the council and the Valuation Office. As a lawyer, I was comfortable reading complex documents, yet I found the whole thing baffling. Different figures. Payments over 10 months. Different deadlines. The council did one part and the Valuation Office another.
Mercifully, our first monthly business rates payment was around £70.
Not £7,000. Not £700. Seventy pounds.
Because I didn’t want to mess it up, politely I queried some of the paperwork with the council. I remember being surprised by how aggressive some of the responses felt. I paid the £70 some days before it was due.
Then, before the payment deadline had even arrived, I received a summons to appear before magistrates for non-payment.
For £70.
And I had already paid it.
The summons was eventually withdrawn, but I have never forgotten it.
As the business expanded, we took additional space and considered subletting one room — a room which could seat six people. A group of highly paid professionals came to view it. Then they started talking about business rates and talked themselves out of taking it.
They convinced themselves that the rates would be tens of thousands of pounds a year — three times the rent.
They were wrong, of course, but walked away anyway.
Later, when looking for larger premises, I viewed one of Harrogate’s most prestigious offices. It had space for around thirty desks and had supposedly been vacant for some time.
Yet the office wasn’t empty….
Half the office floor was covered with enormous shrink-wrapped boxes.
When I asked what they were, the agent explained that they were there to reduce the owner’s empty-property business rates liability. The boxes were empty — but you’d need a court order to discover that!
Apparently this was completely legitimate. A kind of legal chicanery that commercial property types seemed to regard as normal.
And while Parliament Street attracts most attention, the situation around Victoria Shopping Centre is equally depressing.
But I should confess that I am part of the problem. Like many people, I buy things from Amazon that I once bought in town. Governments of all colours have been painfully slow to adapt, taxing physical businesses heavily while online competitors play by different rules.
Like many business owners, I eventually found myself employing a surveyor to deal with rateable values, reliefs and appeals. That is madness.
Imagine needing a specialist company to help you understand your council tax bill. We would regard that as absurd. Yet an entire industry now exists to help businesses navigate business rates.
Many readers will know the Broken Windows theory from New York: visible signs of neglect encourage further neglect. The same must be true for empty premises in Harrogate.
Every town has a tipping point. Too many of our high streets are a mix of empty premises, vape shops, charity shops and barbers. We cannot let Harrogate go this way.
In my experience, the rents often aren’t the problem.
The bigger issue is the labyrinthine mess of rates, reliefs, valuations and administration that surrounds occupation.
We need lower rates, simpler rates and more of the burden shifted onto the online giants that have transformed retail while largely escaping the pressures faced by physical businesses.
Because any system that encourages landlords to fill offices with giant boxes rather than workers is an omnishambles.
And the growing number of empty shops is evidence of it.
