John Lewis managing director Andy Street this morning appeared critical of calls for an online tax - dismissing them as 'rather shrill'.
But he told the Sunday Times of the urgent need to review the business rates system to provide 'answers' to issues raised by retailers across the sector. He said the review needs to come ahead of the next revaluation which begins in 2015.
Street said during an interview with the Sunday Times: 'The rather shrill calls to tax online players to make it fair— I don’t think it’s that simple, actually.'
'What I hope will happen is there will be a really thoughtful approach to how business rates need to be reformed. You could decide, actually, that tax needs to be on turnover, because we still have a tax model that reflects how money was made 20, 30 years ago,' he said in the interview.
He also said he feels a 'sense of satisfaction' over the scrutiny of Amazon's tax arrangements since he slammed their offshore tax structure nine months ago.
The two issues have come to dominate, and sometimes even confuse, debate in the retail sector over the past six months. Several supermarket bosses have called for a tax hike for online retailers to'level the playing field' - even citing Amazon as an online retailer that pays less tax. But Street appeared to draw a line between the two issues.
'I feel very strongly that if we make £100 million and pay 23 per cent [corporation tax] and Amazon makes £100 million and pays nothing in the same country, that cannot be right,' Street said.
'I do not believe they cannot know what profit was made here. So there is definitely a moral issue and there's been a sort of satisfaction to me that the political process has picked up,' he said.
Street said he believed there was still scope for another 20 John Lewis stores of varying sizes nationwide.
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