by Jo James, chief executive of Kent Invicta Chamber of Commerce

If our high streets aren’t suffering enough at present, the last thing they needed was the wettest winter on record.

The recent announcement by Communities Secretary Eric Pickles of a £1bn package of support for UK high streets will no doubt be welcomed with open arms.

This is particularly true regarding the announcement on business rates – a £1,000 discount on retail premises with a value of up to £50,000 and extending the doubling of small business rate relief.

What Westminster needs to wake up to is the fact that business rates are not only a problem for retailers, but a problem for business per se.

They are a huge and rising fixed cost for all businesses and are just as much a problem for businesses on industrial estates and offices, and sometimes more so than the high street retailers.

The Prime Minister has recently committed to looking again at the business rates system. What they need to do now is to set a clear timetable for this and ensure that their colleagues in government do not yet again hide behind the excuse that fundamental reform of business rates is too difficult to achieve.

There are only so many times that you can use a sticky plaster.

A few other positive points in the package of support was the recognition of the importance of e-commerce on the future of our high streets.

Town centres up and down the country got behind the Portas Pilot scheme and hopefully they will be as quick to pick up on the opportunities of a new multi-million pound competition to support business-led digital town centres.

Hopefully the £4.7m government research on e-commerce and digital high streets innovations will also be useful.

However, I’ll bet the one announcement which will be appreciated more by us consumers is the announcements on “unfair parking fines”, adding a grace period.

I think we have all, at some point, had a meeting with an overzealous parking attendant but this is especially useful for when we think we have managed to get away with being 10 minutes late, only to get a nice reminder in the post that you might be able to dodge the parking attendant but you will never win against the CCTV camera.