Simon Danczuk MP

Fighting for Rochdale, Littleborough and Milnrow

January is always a difficult month, as Christmas bills begin to bite and the winter cold sets in. But spare a thought for Britain’s Olympic team who will be up at the crack of dawn putting in hours of gruelling training. One of these is Rochdale’s Stuart Bithell who has recently been selected for the men’s 470 team for the Olympic sailing regatta.

Bithell was a silver medallist in last year’s world championships and I hope everyone in Rochdale will be cheering him on to go one better and win gold this summer. He learned to sail on Hollingworth Lake at just seven years old and continues to be a great ambassador for Hollingworth Lake Sailing Club.

One of the highlights for me this week was a parliamentary debate on the future of town centres. The Government is currently considering its response to the Mary Portas Review and we desperately need strong policies to support our high street.

Some of the things I’d like to see are fairer business rates and an urgent reform of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. In recent months we’ve seen HMRC accused of doing deals with the likes of Vodafone and Goldman Sachs to let them off billions of pounds of taxes. Meanwhile they’ve been found to be illegally issuing late filing penalties to small businesses. Once again its one rule for big business and another one for the small businessman and woman.

The agency that collects business rates for the Government also urgently needs reforming. I recently had a Rochdale bar owner attend my surgery describing how the Government’s business rates agency had told him they were assuming his takings would be around £179,000 per year – a figure he says he could only dream of.

There have been far too many mistakes made in setting unreasonably high business rates and I’m delighted some traders in Rochdale are finally getting a rebate after waiting for nearly two years while their appeals are processed.

I am always keen to attract new investment to Rochdale but I do have some concerns at how international companies see Rochdale as a great place to earn huge profits on the back of vulnerable people. We now have two Canadian sub prime lending shops on our high street charging local people astronomical interest levels. The irony is that in their own country payday loans are limited by tough usury laws. I think it’s time Britain followed suit.