Dan Neidle: Pubs don’t deserve a VAT cut
6/10/202633 min
Why is cutting VAT for specific sectors a bad idea? Should there be a flat rate on everything, including the things currently exempt? Why does cutting business rates only benefit landlords? Are we keeping too many inefficient businesses going?
Dan Neidle from Tax Policy Associates is back to explain why he thinks no one deserves special treatment when it comes to VAT and business rates. Plus why Burnham’s plan to rescue pubs won’t work.
The Rest is Money is brought to you by Octopus Energy, Britain’s smart energy pioneer.
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First 90 secondsDan Neidle· Guest0:01
£10 billion. That is an awful lot of money.
Robert Peston· Host0:03
Sorry, £10 billion just for restaurants and hospitality? Good God.
Dan Neidle· Guest0:07
V-VAT is a really big tax. Hospitality is a pretty large, large part of the economy.
Steph McGovern· Host0:13
You know, people like Andy Burnham talking about what he would do if he came into power, cutting business rates for pubs, and those in the hospitality sector saying that they want a cut on VAT for pubs and restaurants to ten percent.
Dan Neidle· Guest0:27
It's a terrible idea, and out of all the things we could do with £10 billion, which is what it would cost, this is one of the worst.
Robert Peston· Host0:34
So talk us through why the likes of Tom Kerridge are wrong that cutting VAT would be the right thing to do.
Steph McGovern· Host0:43
We're delighted to say that this year The Rest Is Money is powered by Octopus Energy, so we're joined by its founder and CEO, Greg Jackson. Hiya, Greg. Um, you traveled with Prime Minister Keir Starmer on his latest trip to China. Why?
Greg Jackson0:59
There's a lot of people who quite rightly think we're naive if we don't understand the threats we face from China. But it's equally naive not to understand that Chinese, uh, technologies, uh, can now transform so many industries, and if we don't understand what they're doing and find ways to work with them, we're gonna get left behind. Look, the reality is it used to be about China stealing our secrets, but now their own investment in technologies means that solar panels are four hundred times cheaper than they were forty years ago. Batteries for electric cars