"Put £1 on every parcel" - Ribble Valley market founder's call to Prime Minister over Amazon
Any seller dispatching fewer than 5,000 parcels a year would be exempt in full, along with prescriptions, medical supplies and deliveries to housebound and disabled customers.
A Ribble Valley events company has written to the Prime Minister, calling for a levy on every parcel delivery to a home in the UK.
Crafty Vintage, which has has produced markets and festivals across the North West for close to 20 years - including events at Holmes Mill, Hoghton Tower, Gisburn Park and Lancaster Castle - wants the Government to charge £1 for each package, with the money handed straight back to town centres.
It estimates the charge would raise around £3bn a year, close to £58m every week, with Amazon paying the single largest share.
Crafty Vintage sent the proposal to No. 10 North at Heron House in Manchester, along with an invitation for the Prime Minister to visit its Whalley artisan market. They propose that the The charge would fall on the retailer at the point of sale and appear as its own line on the receipt.
Between 3 and 3.5 billion parcels are delivered to UK homes every year, which at £1 each is roughly £3bn annually and closer to double that in the weeks before Christmas. Amazon would pay somewhere between £600m and £750m of it, against a UK turnover of around £30bn.
Broken down locally, Crafty Vintage estimates the charge would generate around £68m a year across Lancashire. The letter proposes the receipts are ringfenced in law and returned to the local authority area the parcel was delivered to, split 60 per cent to transport and 40 per cent to Business Improvement Districts, market infrastructure and town centre renewal. Any seller dispatching fewer than 5,000 parcels a year would be exempt in full, along with prescriptions, medical supplies and deliveries to housebound and disabled customers.
Dan Johnson, who runs Crafty Vintage with business cofounder Laura E Johnson, said the scale of the money is what makes it worth doing. He said: “For 20 years we have made staying at home cheaper than walking into town, and then acted surprised when the towns emptied. Delivery feels free and it is not free. Somebody covers the collapse of the retail base that used to pay for the street. Just not the person who ordered.”
He believes £2.8m a year would transform what a town in Lancashire could do, adding: “That is not a grant round or a pot to bid into. That is shopfronts brought back into use, market infrastructure, empty units filled, a town centre that somebody is actually paid to look after. Every high street scheme of the last 15 years failed the same way. The money arrived once, got spent on a launch event, and left. This money would keep arriving.”
On Amazon, he added: “£600m a year is no threat whatsoever to a business that size. It is a contribution to the streets that business has emptied. A butcher in Whalley pays rates on every square foot of a shopfront. The parcel that leaves a warehouse on a motorway junction contributes nothing at all to the street it arrives on.”