Food: Wholesale Trade

(asked on 12th June 2020) - View Source

Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, if he will make an assessment of the potential merits of extending the (a) Business Rates Relief and (b) Hospitality, Retail and Leisure Grant to the food and drink wholesale sector; and if he will make a statement.


Answered by
Kemi Badenoch Portrait
Kemi Badenoch
President of the Board of Trade
This question was answered on 17th June 2020

The Government recognises that this is a very challenging time for businesses in a wide variety of sectors.

Businesses occupying properties for retail, hospitality or leisure purposes are likely to have been particularly affected by COVID-19 due to their reliance on customer footfall. The Government has provided enhanced support to these businesses through a twelve-month business rates holiday. The Government also recognises that small businesses in the retail, hospitality and leisure sectors are less likely than larger businesses to have sufficient cash reserves to meet their high fixed property-related costs. To help these small businesses, the Government created the Retail, Hospitality and Leisure Grant Fund, which gives grants of up to £25,000 to businesses which occupy properties used for these purposes with a rateable value below £51,000.

Local Authorities (LAs) can choose to make discretionary grants to businesses in retail, hospitality and leisure supply chains, like the wholesale food and drink sector, if they feel there is a particular local economic need. The Government has allocated up to an additional £617 million to LAs to enable them to give discretionary grants. While food and drink wholesalers are not one of the priority groups which Government has asked LAs to focus on, LAs may choose to make payments to businesses outside of these priority groups, so long as the business was trading on 11th March, and has not received any other cash grant funded by central Government (with the exception of grants from the SEISS).

Small businesses which are not eligible for business grants should still be able to benefit from other elements of the Government’s unprecedented package of support. The Business Support website provides further information about how businesses can access the support that has been made available, who is eligible, when the schemes open and how to apply - https://www.gov.uk/business-coronavirus-support-finder.

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