Question: What effect has the budget had on the retail industry?

David Felwick: It has been pretty significant really in the sense that the huge increase in National Insurance contributions will act as a tax on jobs. There are 2.8 million employees in the retail industry, we estimate that the NI contributions will cost more than £100 million.

We had put the position to the Government that the state of the economy had largely been driven by the buoyancy that we had seen in retail sales and they should try and protect that. Now we don't feel that necessarily this tax will do that, it could have an adverse effect by reducing domestic demand.

Question: Talking about National Insurance - how many jobs in the retail sector will this affect?

David Felwick: If you introduce a tax that makes it more expensive to employ people then the natural tendency will be not to increase your workforce.

Question: Your recent figures reveal how retail sales in March recorded their strongest growth in 6 years, so consumer demand doesn't look like it's under any threat?

David Felwick: Well of course that's all historical isn't it, I mean what we're talking about is the future and so it's important I think that we keep that level of growth because if you look across Europe and you look to the United States there are very few economies that are actually making the sort of progress that we are and we believe that's actually being helped by consumer demand, so anything that's likely to threaten that going forward is going to be disadvantageous.

Question: Isn't there an argument that consumer demand should be dampened a little to ensure the economy doesn't spiral into high inflation?

David Felwick: There's a balance that has to be struck, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence that inflation is moving up. The inflation target has been met by the Government so I don't think that that's an argument for change at the moment.

Question: Economists have recently said that there is such strong business confidence at the moment that they would be looking for interest rates to go up. Would you go along with that assessment?

David Felwick: I would think that having put National Insurance up to the level that they have, and as I said it will play through next year and 2003 that you will probably introduce a natural dampening effect already. So I think it would be very, very premature to play with interest rates and our view would be that they should stay as they are.

Question: What other issues would the retail sector liked to have seen in the budget?

David Felwick: I think crime reduction was a main one, but I think it's probably wise to say that we welcome the fact that there was no increase in duty on spirits and beers and we welcome also the fact that there was no increase in VAT generally. So some of the issues we were concerned about, Government clearly listened to, but of course that has to be set against this very large increase in National Insurance contributions which are, you know, by any standard, pretty massive.

Question: Do you think enough attention was given to reducing crime?

David Felwick: We welcome any expenditure in the crime area and what we have seen is expenditure to increase our front line police, but when you've got street crime you also have shop crime and theft in shops is at an unprecedented level driven by in some large measure by requirements for people to fund drug regimes and so we would have been looking for the Government to help a little bit more in controlling shop crime.

Question: How much is retail crime costing the industry?

David Felwick: As an industry we spend £626 million on retail crime prevention, we estimate the total cost of crime to the retail sector is more than £2 billion.

There is a huge cost to retailers large and small, and I should probably stress here small in particular, to the expenditure they have to put in place be it shutters, be it cameras to help combat crime. And indeed the BRC with others have in the last couple of years established a number of crime reduction partnerships across the country where we co-ordinate with the police and in those areas crime has been reduced; and we were actually looking to the Government for quite a small sum in fact, £2.3m to set up and to maintain these crime reduction partnerships and to encourage more. And we've not yet had a response from Government.

Question: What's at stake if the Government isn't forthcoming with this funding?

David Felwick: I think that we'll continue to lobby Government over this. The BRC has a large interest in trying to protect its members against crime and help them and give them advice, and so we'll continue to place a high profile on crime reduction, particularly in shopping areas.

Question: Is there anything the Government can do to protect retail staff from increasing attacks?

David Felwick: I think that's all part of the general rise in crime isn't it and I would hope that some of the £280m which has been announced by David Blunkett will go to providing more community policing. I actually do believe that if you can get more presence on the beat, that will act as a natural disincentive, and so the more money that goes in that direction the better in our view.

Question: Does the retail industry have a specific champion of its cause within Government?

David Felwick: We touch all areas of Government and we have felt in the past that it was such a diverse and indeed important need given the size of the retail industry and it's importance to the economy, that perhaps, you know, it would be a good idea to have a minister of retail, but perhaps more realistically we have now established closer links with the Department of Trade and Industry and I think it's true to say they are willing to act as champion for retail and so we hope that will fit the bill.

Question: But they have a consumer affairs minister at DTI don't they?

David Felwick: Well of course they do, so they see both sides of the issues don't they?

The other thing we also have is something quite unique. We have a very strong, powerful all party parliamentary group for retail and we have retail champions in both the House of Commons and House of Lords who are back bench cross party MPs who take an active interest and have been very active in retail.

Question: A big criticism of the retail sector in the UK is that when you compare certain goods in the UK, consumers pay far more than their counterparts in Europe and it's been dubbed as rip-off Britain. What do you make of these claims?

David Felwick: I think the rip-off Britain campaign is now quite old hat frankly. It was at its height some 18 months to two years ago and there were of course, as you will recall, a number of investigations into some of these claims and overall that particular claim of 'rip-off Britain' was not found to be sustainable.

I remember how the Government spent £2m trying to prove that supermarkets in the UK were expensive and I think the only product that they came up with that potentially, and they didn't even prove it, was more expensive, was dog food.

Question: So what's your message to your critics who argue the UK retail sector can give consumers a bad deal?

David Felwick: I don't think they do. I think that you have a great range of retailers. I think they operate at very high standards and I think they're generally very competitively priced so I think that we provide a very good service to consumers.