Retail Relief

In his November 2013 Autumn Statement the Chancellor said

“I can announce today that for the next two years every retail premise in England with a rateable value of up to £50,000 will get a discount on their business rates.

This discount will be worth £1000 off their bills.”

It would be wrong to say didn’t tell the truth but lazy civil servants have made a liar of him.

It was announced after the speech that the relief would be given by way of the Council’s discretionary relief powers with central government making up the difference to the business rates pool.

Some bright spark then must have spotted that discretionary relief is subject to European State Aid regulations and therefore the most a company can receive is €200,000 in a three year period. Actually it is worse than that: the regulations talk about entities and defines an entity as a group of companies. So if you have lots companies within your group you will have to choose which properties within which company get the relief.

Sheffield Council spotted that State Aid could not be given to companies in distress so their application form asked for audited accounts to be provided. I assume they were just making a point because they have since given the relief without the accounts being supplied.

Added to the confusion caused by this there is also a matter of timing. The State Aid rules say that the exchange rate used in calculating whether the threshold has been reached is the official EU rate for the month in which the relief was offered.

So, was the relief offered in November 2013 when the exchange rate was £1 = 1.1684 and you could have the relief applied to 171 of your properties? Or is it March 2014 when most of the bills were issued and the exchange rate was £1 = €1.219 so you could have relief applied to 164 sites? Or April when it was £1 to €1.209 and 165 sites?

Some Councils only started applying the relief in July by which time the Pound was stronger so can you only have relief on 159 properties?

A cynic might be tempted to ask the councils who were not efficient enough to get the Retail Relief sorted in March for compensation for the several thousand Pounds their tardiness might have cost. But any compensation would be discretionary and therefore subject to State Aid rules.