Editorial: ​Businesses cannot feasibly shoulder Northern Ireland’s funding shortfall, which is caused by huge expenditure and a refusal to seek extra funding from individuals or households

​John O’Dowd has reversed his planned major rates hike for businesses.

​This is good because those rates are already too high. It is particularly welcome for hospitality, which is a creative and key part not just of the Northern Ireland economy, but our culture – restaurants, hotels, pubs and clubs that can be a joy to visit.

These businesses are often kept lively by sustained, regular and costly refurbishments of premises.

There is a cowardice in piling rates on to businesses, and while this newspaper deplores Sinn Fein’s almost childish notion that there are lots of wealthy companies and individuals you can tax to fund huge expenditure (there aren’t), it is not the only party to have hidden behind colossal rates on businesses.

Set aside for a moment the fact that large, supposedly wealthy companies – major supermarkets, for example – are not fat-cat wealthy due to greed or extortion. They are, on the contrary, often outstanding enterprises which employ people, provide a great service to customers and often at real value to the wider public. In other words, they are a major service to Northern Ireland. The same is true of the bigger hospitality outlets. But even if we can’t all accept that about big companies, excessive rates clobber small and medium sized businesses and deter would-be entrepreneurs from launching such ventures.

The wider issue with regard to rates is the politicians of most, if not all, parties have done somersaults to protect residential ratepayers. Northern Ireland has no water charges, and Stormont would not even edge up the regional rate by a rate sufficient to help make NI solvent.

And this newspaper is not, as it happens, arguing for more local taxes. We are saying that we cannot both refuse to make any real efficiencies on public expenditure, protect individuals from paying more, then think that either London or businesses can take up all the slack.