Rates experts slam government after shocking surge in appeals

Business rates experts at Colliers have slammed the government after new figures show that more than 400,000 firms have registered appeals against their business rates bills.

Latest Check Challenge, Appeal (CCA) business rates figures to the end of March 2021 show that since 1 April 2020, 409, 430 checks, the first stage of the appeals process, have been registered by businesses, most of whom had been impacted by the Covid health crisis.

This figure dwarfs the 158,910 number of checks registered in the previous three years since the start of the list, in April 2017 to end of March 2020.

Last month the government announced that it would legislate that Material Change in Circumstances (MCC) appeals for businesses impacted by Covid-19 would not be valid for the appeal system, a move that was lambasted by the rating profession at the time, including by John Webber (pictured), head of Business Rates at Colliers.

He said: “These latest figures explain why the Government acted as it did and why its Valuation Office Agency (VOA) was allowed to change the law- to prevent 400,000 business rate payers who felt their bills were unfair- from contesting them.

“It 's a disgrace. The government ripped up the rule book retrospectively - purely because the numbers were too high.

“Over 400,000 businesses had gone to the trouble of registering through the tortuous CCA appeals system in good faith, so that their cases could be properly assessed, to find the goal posts moved before their very eyes. ”

He continued: “The government offered a £1.5 billion business rates relief fund instead- but this comes nowhere near compensating what businesses have lost through the pandemic. And as the government has not begun the process of either putting local authorities in receipt of these funds or giving guidance on how to distribute them, businesses have so far received nothing- and are unlikely to in the near future. ”

“Given both the Smoking ban and Foot and Mouth were accepted as grounds for MCC appeals, it 's shocking that Covid-19 has been rejected, despite earlier assurances from the VOA. This is pure and simply retrospective legislation, amounting to a retrospective tax increase- and created because dealing with the true problem is just too difficult. “