ACS Blog

Business rates have dominated the retail industry’s reaction to the Autumn Statement this week, and you can see what we have said here.  I wanted to use this blog to talk about another issue, buried deep in the papers accompanying the Chancellor’s speech: tobacco licensing.  The Autumn Statement includes a commitment to consult on whether to introduce a licensing system for vendors of tobacco, which could include local shops.  The government say (and I believe them) that they approach th

We heard about George Osborne’s promise to devolve business rates to local authorities while waiting to start our fringe meeting at the Conservative party conference, just yards from where the Chancellor was speaking. This looked like another Osborne bombshell, hot on the heels of his planned devolution of Sunday trading and announcement of a national living wage of over £9 by 2020.

This week we launched our Local Shop Report, and it was great to see so many of you in Manchester to be among the first to get the information and to have the chance to discuss it with colleagues in the industry.

I’ve been pleased to see this week more companies and sector organisations – in farming and the care industry – raising concerns about the chancellor’s decision to introduce a national living wage at £7.20 in April 2016, rising to at least £9 by 2020.

If you haven’t noticed, this has been a hell of a week. 

So you would expect me to be writing about Sunday trading this week.  The Chancellor's decision to devolve decisions on Sunday trading hours to mayors or councils is a hammer blow to our sector, and puts in jeopardy a piece of legislation that helps small shops and that has become totemic for our members.

This week we took a trip over the Severn Bridge to the Welsh Assembly in Cardiff for a meeting of the Cross Party Group on Small Shops.  As with All Party Groups in Westminster, these groups can provide a useful focal point for discussing issues relating to particularly industries or issues, and before I forget, here is more information on the inquiry being led by the Small Shops Group in Westminster into Britain’s Everyday Entrepreneurs, which we helped launch in June.

I’ve been thinking a bit lately about data – how we use and abuse it and how businesses in our sector should deal with it.  A few things have caused me to mull on this topic.

Firstly, in the wake of the general election various commentators have attacked the pollsters for failing to predict the result.  My view is that the pollsters provide one data source – it’s for the commentators to interpret this and turn it into knowledge or a forecast.  It there was a failure in the pre-election media debate, the pollsters are only responsible for a small part of it.

Well that was a surprise wasn’t it?  I had predicted that the Conservatives would get most votes, but like everyone else who had an opinion on the election – including Conservative strategists and pollsters – I didn’t expect to see a majority Tory government.  So what does this mean for our sector?

This week both major political parties have launched their manifestos. I should say at this point that all our analysis of what this means for our sector is here in our election centre so I would go over all the detail now.