Member

Frankly, that was a propaganda point, and there was certainly a reaction from retailers to that assertion. In an angry follow-up letter in The Grocer from Paul Cheema, the founding director of C-Talk—Convenience Talk—Paul pointed out that the opposite is true. Most significantly for these amendments, he pointed out that 1,450 small shops have recently written letters to the Government highlighting what they call the economic vandalism of the Bill. Mr Cheema noted bitterly that every one of those letters has gone unanswered. The Government should therefore pay much more attention to these SME retailers, not ignore them. In the recent Federation of Independent Retailers survey of 9,000 retailers, its members were worried about how they are going to cope with the security implications of the Bill and felt that, combined with rising costs linked to taxation, labour costs and the shoplifting we have heard about, their businesses will struggle even to survive.