I AM writing in response to Monday’s budget in regards to the state of our town centres.

I commend that business rates have been slashed for up to 90 per cent of businesses and the introduction of a new tax for large online companies.

Unfortunately, this is only a small start. The online company tax is token at best and goes no way to recovering the tax that some of these companies continue to avoid.

The chancellor is guilty of narrow focus, the budget ignored large issues like exploitative rents.

This needs revising for business and housing properties, with controls desperately needed. This will make overheads cheaper for shops and home renters will have added money spend in those shops.

He also ignored workers with inadequate minimum wage.

A token rise in tax threshold for the low earners, with a nice tax cut for those higher earners.

This has ignored ONS data (2017) showing the lowest of top 10 per cent of earners earn over 7.7 times a week more than those in the second bottom decile group (£1,619pw vs £209pw).

Lower earners spend around 25 per cent of weekly earnings through recreation, restaurants and clothing; as seen in Dorchester town centre, compared to around 20 per cent for top earners.

Lower earners spending higher proportions of earnings, thus isn’t it logical to ensure lower earners have more money to spend?

Cutting rates is applauded, but we need to view this with eyes wide open.

Soon Revenue Support Grants will disappear for Dorset, and reliance will be on business rates and council tax. Where business rates went 50/50 to council/government, 100% will stay with council.

This is worrying for councils; no support grant, and business rates cut. What are they to do? Our town centres are just not strong enough to support our needs. This system may work for bustling Cities, but not for rural communities like Dorset.

The chancellor should have reversed some of the cuts to councils.

Despair for our public services!

The workload remains but we will cut personnel. It is already predicted that 200 middle tier jobs (not to mention lower tier jobs) will go to when we transition to Unitary (Dorset Echo 12/10/18) to save up to £8million, we wait to see how many other jobs disappear when funding starts to decline.

Can town centres like Dorchester afford these job losses?

Is the private sector ready to pick up the newly unemployed? I think not, it would not be illogical to presume that our working population will decrease or move away, leaving less custom for our historic town centre.

RICHARD ROBSON

Dorchester