Reduce rate liabilities
Are you: fully utilising the Government’s Covid-19 relief schemes; understand if your rating valuation is too high or your empty space liabilities can be mitigated?
Considerations
- Have you reviewed the Government’s Covid‐19 rates relief scheme? Targeted at the retail and hospitality sectors, less obvious property uses may be eligible for 100% relief from the 1st April 2021 to the 30th June 2021 with 66% relief through to 31st March 2022. The scheme is capped at £2 million per business.
- Are you aware of the Government’s new £1.5 billion COVID-19 Additional Relief Fund (CARF)? Funds for sectors not in retail and hospitality have been released to local authorities to provide relief to businesses adversely affected through the pandemic. Applications need go in now.
- General and additional material opportunities still exist to reduce values with savings backdated to the 1st April 2017 through to the 31st March 2023.
- Do you hold empty/vacant space and now face a full rates liability? These liabilities can be mitigated.
- Do you understand the implications to your business from the 2023 rating revaluation, which will form the basis of your liability for 3 years from April 2023.
Insight
The UK government has introduced a number of reliefs and grants (administered through the billing authorities) to help affected businesses hit during the crisis. The reliefs and grants are complex and have varying deadlines, which are easy to miss. A number of opportunities exist to reduce your liabilities:-
- An audit to identify Covid-19 reliefs and grants you may have missed.
- Avison Young can explore several schemes to reduce vacant rate liabilities. Depending on the scheme adopted, we can ensure savings of up to 78% on annual liability.
- We have saved our clients over 2.5 billion over the last 10 years in business rates through reducing rating assessments. Savings can still be backdated to the 1st April 2017, although this opportunity will expire from 31st March 2023. We urge a review now to determine whether your assessment offers scope to deliver savings.
- We are preparing our clients for the implications of the new 2023 rating revaluation, where values can reflect the impact of Covid-19 on individual markets and locations.
Avison Young’s market leading business rates team is made up of 70 members of staff working in strong teams across all UK regions and Eire. The sector depth and experience of the team is outstanding. I am very proud of the quality of our advice and level of mitigation work we undertake for our clients. We represent over 2,000 clients, operating from over 25,000 assessed properties and managing over £5.6 billion of total RV, around 8% of the value of all assessments in the UK. Over the last 7 years we have saved our clients £2.5 bn.
Our client mix covers all sectors, with strong representation in public and private, instructions covering occupiers, landlords, investors and developers.
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