Robert Paston

speaker

388 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 10 Jun

Robert Paston’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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The Rest Is Money · 286. Dan Neidle: Pubs don’t deserve a VAT cut · 10 Jun 2026 podcast

He has said that were he to be prime minister, he would cut business rates for pubs, which I suppose raises two questions for me, which is.

In general, should pubs be a special case?

But secondly, what is your view about essentially cutting council tax as a route to help any sector of business, including pubs?

One of the things that is quite striking is that governments have cut business rates to help sectors, but they tend to have made it explicit that they were temporary reductions, presumably to prevent the landlords from either, depending on your point of view, rapaciously or sensibly, essentially adjusting the rent in their favour, as it were.

And so I assume

I assume you're not opposed to temporary support in a crisis via the business rate system.

Your concern would be about permanent cuts in business rates.

So one of the things I was very struck by, there was quite a famous review by a bunch of economists, including John Van Rienen, who was one of this chancellor's early advisors of productivity, particularly productivity in France.

This was about 10 years ago.

And one of the things they showed was,

It's the point that you are actually making about VAT and the fact that, you know, when you get these cliff edges of taxes going up above a particular threshold, you create this deterrent for businesses to grow.

So in France, there is a whole raft of benefits for being a small business.

which means that they have an astonishing number of small businesses below a certain threshold and not as many perhaps bigger businesses as would be good for the productivity of the country.

And so these, you know, so when you provide special help to small businesses, you've really got to be very careful that you are not creating disincentives to grow and become more productive and better employers.

I mean, I've got a sort of...

different sort of concern, which is more of a long-term concern.

I mean, my view has always been that it's a really bad idea to set up a business to take advantage of tax breaks.

And obviously, tax and cost levels make businesses uncompetitive in a global market above a certain level.

But I've broadly taken the view that taxes should not be fundamental to your decision about essentially whether to create a business.

You obviously, as I say, need to have a government that keeps costs at a reasonable level.

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