Chancellor George Osborne is likely to announce a victory over the number of business rates appeals cleared in this afternoon’s Autumn Statement.
The chancellor promised in last year’s Autumn Statement to clear 95% of the 170,000 appeals in the system by July 2015. A Freedom of Information request put in by EG shows that the valuations tribunal service is likely to exceed its target.
Figures from the VTS show that over 84,000 non-domestic rates appeals were cleared between the Autumn Statement last year and the end of September this year. A further 1,600 were reinstated and 41,400 were postponed. At its current rate by the July deadline the VTS is on track to clear over 200,000 cases.
The news comes as GVA claimed UK businesses have paid £10.3bn in unecessary rates due to the exponential growth in the retail price index over the last five years, which guides increases in the tax. It is calling for the Chancellor to keep the cap on business rates growth saying no other major tax increases annually in line with inflation.
David Jones, Senior Director at GVA comments: “At the very least the government should take the relatively simple step of changing the annual increase from the RPI to the CPI inflationary measure. If CPI had been applied from 2000 rather than the RPI index, business rates would now be 10% lower for every business.”
Industry experts warned that the triumph over the number of appeals may just be a numbers game and may not help the property industry. “They are clearing sufficient numbers every month but the cases that remain are the more complex ones and these will not go away without external intervention,” said Jerry Schurder, partner and head of business rates at Gerald Eve.
Click on the graph below to see the numbers in full. Hover over the figures to see the exact figures.
