COMMENT The government’s latest business rates consultation, the fundamental review, is proposing reforms that will effectively lock landlords out of the appeals process for their tenanted properties and may be something of a Trojan horse – a backdoor way of restricting the rights of a ratepayer to challenge their assessment.
On the one hand, the government is proposing something the industry wants – more regular revaluations – even though it will still leave a lag of two years between the date of valuation and the effective date of rateable values.
On the other hand, it is making it nigh on impossible for landlords to ever appeal tenanted property.
The review was put in place with the aim of making rateable values more meaningful and reflective of market conditions with considered evidence, and to avoid the classic last-day submission of thousands of appeals being launched by ratepayers.
Yet the reforms proposed include narrowing the appeals window to three months from the start of the new rating list as well as making ratepayers pay to request supporting evidence and information for their appeals.
That effectively makes it impossible to put in a well-considered and evidenced appeal on time – particularly for those that have multiple properties.
Although the industry generally welcomes more frequent revaluations, meaning that fluctuations in valuation would be captured more in line with the cycle and thus represent a fairer rateable value across all commercial premises, this has brought with it many other clauses likely to cause concern to ratepayers up and down the country.
We also question the ability of the Valuation Office Agency’s website to deal with a three-month window of appeals and initial transparency requests given the technical issues we have seen over the last cycle. It is crucial that ratepayers’ ability to challenge their liability is not impacted or lost.
If this does go ahead, the only way to prepare is to prepare – know how to mitigate against these likely changes coming down the line, get your information and research in place now, and be ready to challenge them as soon as the window opens using an expert who can navigate the process on your behalf.
Ryan Jones is a partner at Cluttons
