Business Rates

The problem

Rates are assessed on a valuation of your property, drawn up from information the Valuation Office holds about it — floor areas, use, layout, the state of the surrounding location. That information ages. Buildings are altered, space is taken out of use, neighbouring development changes the character of a street, and the assessment quietly stops matching reality. Meanwhile the liability is paid every month without question, because it arrives looking like a tax rather than a bill.

The rules around it are not simple either. Reliefs and exemptions come with conditions and deadlines, transitional arrangements smooth changes in ways that are rarely intuitive, and the Check, Challenge, Appeal process has evidential requirements that catch out anyone treating it as a form-filling exercise.

How we help

• Empty property and reliefs — making sure you claim what you are entitled to, on time, and that the way you hold vacant space does not cost you more than it needs to.
• Serviced Office rates management — informing the local council when changes happen and ensuring empty property rates relief is applied correctly.
• Check, Challenge and Appeal — preparing the evidence properly, presenting the argument, and being realistic with you about the prospects before you spend money pursuing them.
• Forecasting and budgeting — a defensible view of what rates will cost across the life of a lease or a revaluation cycle, for budgets, for lease negotiations and for transactions.
• Portfolio review — where a business occupies many sites, finding the handful that are materially wrong rather than tinkering with all of them.

What an engagement looks like

We start with your rating data and a short conversation about each property. That alone usually separates the assessments worth examining from the ones that are broadly right. Where there is a case, we tell you what it is, what evidence it rests on and what it is likely to be worth — before you commit. Where there is not, we say so; there is no value to either of us in a challenge that will fail.