Business
Wetherspoon and Business Rates Reform
J D Wetherspoon PLC is advocating for two key tax reforms to benefit the pub industry: equal VAT treatment with supermarkets and a reduction in the business rates multiplier from its current 43 pence to 28 pence. The company believes that basing business rates on profits, as proposed by Greene King, is overly complex and bureaucratic, preferring the simplicity and direct cash benefit of a reduced multiplier. Wetherspoon argues that this approach is easier to implement and understand, providing a tangible advantage to pubs which they believe are currently overtaxed. Disclaimer*
About this update from J D Wetherspoon Plc
[{"type":"text","content":"\n\nJ D WETHERSPOON PLC\n \n17th March 2026\n \nJ D WETHERSPOON PLC\n \nLet's Agree a Simple Message on Business Rates\nBy Tim Martin\n \nWetherspoon, Fuller's, St Austell, Shepherd Neame and many other family brewers backed Jacques Borel's campaign for approximate VAT equality with supermarkets a dozen or so years ago.\n \nThe failure of Jacques' campaign in the UK, in contrast to great success elsewhere in the world, was testament to the irrationality and disunity of most of the upper echelons of the UK's licensed trade in matters of taxation.\n \nFor reasons best known to themselves, probably connected to political allegiance to the then government, Enterprise Inns, Greene King and trade newspaper the Morning Advertiser poured scorn on Jacques' VAT campaign, helping to ensure its failure.\n \nBoth Greene King and Enterprise Inns now have different, and more business savvy, managements which, no doubt, see the error of their predecessors' disastrous policies- both companies' pubs, in common with the rest of the pub industry, have lost vast swathes of their beer trade to supermarkets in recent years.\n \nHowever, supporters of Jacques will have suffered a frisson of anxiety when Greene King, on a frolic of their own, launched a campaign for business rates reform last summer- to some of us, it didn't quite add up.\n \nGreene King's main pitch was to base business rates on a pub's profit, rather than on sales, or \"fair maintainable trade\", in the jargon of valuation experts.\n \nWetherspoon sympathises with Greene King's desire to find a formula which takes into account the vast reduction in pub profitability and sales in recent decades, but we query their chosen methodology.\n \nIf rateable values were to be based on profits, rather than trade, the existing knowledge and education of business rates experts, acting on behalf of the government, but also for licensees, would need to be replaced by the more complex and expensive expertise of the accountancy profession.\n \nTraditionally, and at great expense, accountants are called upon when the profits of businesses require close examination.\n \nGreene King's advocacy of profit-based business rates is also at odds with the principle of a property tax, which is based on the value of the property ...