AS YOUR front page (Thursday, Jan 16) points out, high costs are indeed driving businesses into the ground, and are turning Brighton's lovely shopping streets into corrugated paint-sprayed ghettos.

But blaming our council for charging exorbitant rates is not hitting the bulls eye: business rates are automatically pegged to business rents. And business rent levels are locked in a vicious and short-sighted legal framework where - regardless of the wider economy or of how many businesses are going bust- all rent reviews are "upwards only", and all negotiations of settlements between lessees and landlords get artificially stoked by every other equally one-sided negotiation in the area.

Landlords and agents are still, after "The worst year for retail on record", trying to gouge their struggling tenants for increases of hundreds of pounds per month.

Somebody needs to remind landlords that the value of their bricks-and-mortar investment can go down as well as up, and that their rental value should not be artificially 'insulated' from the realities of economic cycles.

Like many honest, hard-working small business owners, I find myself struggling desperately not to go under.

Robert Brayley-Hodgetts

Proud owner of Hove's largest and longest running Health and Wellbeing Centre

Essence Hove