It’s one of the big financial albatrosses in the lives of the UK’s big supermarket retailers. The burden of paying annual business rates against their shops and megastores is the largest tax that they pay and will almost certainly be an instrumental factor in whether some of their outlets operate profitably or lose money.
No surprise, then, that all of the big players welcomed the government’s decision to allow them a 12-month payments holiday to give them an additional buffer in their efforts to deal with the potential impact of the coronavirus crisis on trading over the coming months.
Shareholders too, in the main, reacted extremely favourably to the move. The stock prices of all of the quoted supermarkets — with the inexplicable initial exception