Amazon pays 7.1 per cent. Temu pays no duty. Lancashire’s high streets are picking up the bill

Crafty Vintage co founder Dan Johnson has taken his £1 parcel levy to a Commons select committee. He explains why Lancashire has more to gain from it than almost anywhere in the country.

In September a one page letter I wrote from Whalley became written evidence to the House of Commons Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee’s inquiry into revitalising high streets. Not through a trade body or a lobbyist. Just a market organiser with a laptop who got fed up watching towns he trades in go quiet.

The evidence is now on Parliament’s website for anyone to read. Here’s the short version of why I sent it.

Amazon turns over around £30bn a year in the UK. According to the Fair Tax Foundation, its five biggest UK companies paid about £39m in corporation tax last year, an effective rate of 7.1 per cent. Its main UK arm booked a tax credit while profits rose to £355m. A large share of UK income is still routed through Luxembourg, as it has been for years.

Temu and Shein take a different route to the same result. No UK warehouse, no bulk import. Individual parcels are airfreighted straight from Guangdong to the customer’s door, and because each one sits under the £135 threshold it pays no customs duty at all. A Lancashire clothing retailer importing the same stock in bulk pays 12 per cent.

Low value imports from China more than doubled in 2024/25. Temu’s UK revenue is up 171 per cent. The Treasury accepts the damage, says so in print, and has agreed to close the loophole in October 2028. The EU closed it in July. The US closed it last year.

Neither company has a shop in Clitheroe, Preston or Blackburn. Both use the roads, the doorsteps and the towns. Neither contributes to keeping them alive.

My proposal is a £1 levy on every parcel delivered to a residential address. Charged to the retailer at checkout as a fixed statutory line and remitted to HMRC so a company running its own delivery fleet cannot route around it. Ringfenced in law and returned to the council area the parcel was delivered to: 60 per cent to transport, 40 per cent to markets, town centres and high streets.

Collect the parcel yourself from a shop, locker or pickup point and the charge is nothing. That exemption is the whole point. For the first time since Amazon arrived, the cheapest way to receive a parcel would involve walking into a town centre.

Nationally, 2.5bn to 3bn residential deliveries a year puts the figure at £2.5bn to £3bn, with Amazon alone remitting between £600m and £750m. Colorado and Minnesota already run versions of it and both have survived repeal attempts.

Our own estimates, scaled by population, put Lancashire’s share at around £55m to £68m a year. Around £6.5m for Preston. Around £7m for Blackburn with Darwen. Close to £3m for Ribble Valley. Every year, no borrowing, no bidding round, no waiting for a Whitehall announcement.

Lancashire’s towns are exactly the sort of places this money would reach: market towns with a high street, a bus service under pressure and a council that has cut everything it can. We have more to gain per head than the big cities do.

Matthew Brown, leader of Preston City Council, has backed the levy publicly, the first council leader to do so. Lancashire County Council’s leader has passed it up the line within Reform. My own MP, Jonathan Hinder, has engaged, and I’ve asked him to host me at Westminster on the day the committee takes oral evidence on business rates and out of town retail. The original letter to Andy Burnham at Number 10 North has still had no reply.

The full case, the numbers, the American evidence and every objection raised so far, along with how the design changed in response, are at poundaparcel.co.uk. If you run a business in Lancashire, a shop, a market stall or a council, I’d ask you to read it and tell me where it’s wrong. Three online retailers already did, and the policy is better for it.