Non-Domestic Rating Bill

Earl of Lytton Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 19th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to have another go at business rate legislation. As I always do, I inform the House that I am a fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, and a member of the Institute of Revenues Rating and Valuation and of the Rating Surveyors’ Association. I am also a co-owner of a non-domestic hereditament that benefits from small business exemption, and I used to work in the Inland Revenue valuation office.

With those declarations, I thank the Minister for reaching out and arranging a meeting with her and her officials, and for the follow-up information provided. I am extremely grateful for that. I agree with many of her overarching statements on what is happening here.

When I asked what impact assessments had been carried out—a matter to which the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, referred—I was told that it is not customary to undertake them for tax-related purposes and I was offered a rather less detailed impact note. I feel that business rate payers must not be used as a beta test bed for emerging ideas and that the repeated suggestions that the Valuation Office Agency will see how things progress are, arguably, destabilising in their own right.

I have said before in this House that, to some extent, this is another attempt to make an old steam loco do what it was never designed to do in terms of the burdens imposed and the reliability of the system. At a levied rate of more than 50% of the assessed annual value of every business property, this remains a tax that is objectively excessive to the point that it imperils its own stability. It is also out of kilter with international comparators. It burdens businesses disproportionately by reference to property value and, most particularly, as to the use and benefit of local services in which they have no formal voice and certainly no vote. Worse, it discourages a certain amount of investment and entrepreneurial activity. Complexity and new burdens continue to be added because HMRC can do so without responsibility for outcomes or risk of push-back. Council tax payers, by contrast, have for many years been protected from any comparable increase in their level of local financial contribution.

Short-termism and modal shift are the outcomes of changes in economics and are, to some extent, propelled further by the business rates environment. Firms that would once have been high street operators now function from cheaper industrial sites, where the shop window is on the internet or social media, the stockroom is the white van on the highway network, and the cash desk is a web-based payment system. Former shopping streets are populated with eateries and charity shops—I should add that many charity shops do not pay business rates. Shorter leases and break clauses are part and parcel of the landscape. Many and varied reliefs have had to be given to address the problems, and the rules relating to them have become ever-more complex. That apart, the Minister is right that a property-based business tax is an effective system provided it is used correctly, and that is a very important proviso.

On the detail, I start with Clause 1, which inserts new Schedule 4ZA into the 1988 Act, and Part 3 of that new schedule relating to the proposed improvement relief. I have already expressed to the Minister in a private meeting my surprise that improvements which may have a lifespan of 20 years or more will benefit from only a single year’s disapplication of any rental value uplift they create. While I understand that it is specifically intended that the relief should not benefit investors or developers, I cannot disentangle this from standard commercial lease terms in which the landlord’s consent and co-operation may be required. The architecture here is, to some extent, misconceived. Although I am informed that substantial funds are earmarked for this, I fail to see any incentive likely to overcome the narrow qualification criteria for this relief. Meanwhile, we still have the situation where heavy industry is obliged, in many cases, to put in at additional expense complex emission controls and other measures, adding nothing to the productive capacity of the property but where the plant and machinery element represented by those improvements is increased thereby and the rateable value with it. This is nonsense and should not continue.

In Clause 5, I welcome the general direction of travel towards shorter revaluation cycles, but they need to be more frequent still. If Scotland can do it, so can we in England. As the rate of mercantile change accelerates, it is clear the non-domestic rating system has not kept up, has been slow to adapt, and has created a large measure of injustice and inequality, damaging confidence in the tax and, to some extent, the credibility of those responsible for its management. This is regrettable.

Clause 6, on transitional relief, is a welcome shift. I simply ask whether it is the Government’s intention to abolish downward phasing altogether—an arrangement in which those who should be paying lower business rates gain only on some never-never principle because this funds transitional relief for those who should be paying more. In terms of natural justice, I would be glad to see it gone and the principles of fiscal neutrality become more elastic. The Minister’s assurances given a few moments ago are welcome.

Clause 10 is welcome because it has long been a complaint that, while the Valuation Office Agency demands information from ratepayers’ representatives to justify valuations, VOA officers can effectively ignore similar requests from ratepayers. On transparency grounds, this has long needed rectification. We will have to see how this turns out or whether the confidentiality arguments that have been put forward in the past will continue to be fielded as a reason for the VOA not honouring the spirit of this provision. However, I welcome it for what it is thus far.

Clause 13 is a new reporting obligation. I thought the rationale behind the frequency of making declarations of changes—an event date plus 60 days, in addition to a financial year end plus 60 days’ reporting—was that if ratepayers had to make a disclosure with that frequency then reviews of the valuation list should match that. That seems logical. That was my reading of the message from the consultation process. Requiring virtual real-time data, which is in effect what this Bill asks for, was the corollary of having annual—or at any rate, much more frequent—valuation list updates. Given this asymmetry, I welcome the Minister’s comments about the potential for further shortening the revaluation frequency and the antecedent date gap between the date of valuation and the date of coming into force of the list.

On the detail of the declarations required, there are in fact two separate circumstances. The first is the information to be provided to HMRC, as set out in Clause 13(2) which inserts new paragraphs into Schedule 9 of the 1988 Act. New paragraph 4F spells out that it is a change in any of three instances of taxpayer reference, VAT registration and national insurance number. However, I remain unclear how the tax bit in particular works for a sole trader operating as an incorporated business. The proposition seems needlessly fussy.

The reporting arrangement for this is set out in the previous paragraph 4E and is to HMRC’s portal. All the information required by paragraph 4F will already be known to central government departments—hey ho. But secondly, at paragraph 4J, there is a separate requirement to report any notifiable information within the ratepayer’s possession or control, including, at paragraph 4J(2)(a) and (b), any changes in the ratepayer identity or, as we have heard, anything,

“that would or might affect the existence, extent or rateable value of the hereditament”.

This is not just physical change. Many ratepayers do not understand what constitutes a “hereditament”, let alone what may be deemed in the view of the VOA to affect it. Although I take the point made by the Minister that this extends at paragraph 4J(3) to what the ratepayer

“knows, or could reasonably be expected to know, that it would assist a valuation officer in carrying out functions”,

I hope we are going to get a clearer definition at some stage and an explanation of the apparent lack of impact analysis, especially as regards small businesses at one end of the spectrum and a retailer with hundreds of hereditaments at the other.

Furthermore, the reporting arrangement under paragraph 4J is not, as one might expect, to HMRC as before but potentially via a different system to be set up by the VOA, using an online facility referred to at paragraph 4L. There will potentially be two different portal routes. I understand that there is to be a pilot, and that the reporting arrangements are to be consolidated via one portal, and that this will not be implemented unless the VOA is satisfied it is fully functional. That is very welcome in what otherwise could be unnecessary duplication.

I remind your Lordships that the barriers to accessing the check, challenge and appeal system under the business rates process were put in place deliberately to deter the so-called rating agent cowboys. I hope there will be some guarantee that, under this new data-harvesting exercise, small unrepresented businesses will not fall into the hands of precisely the same charlatans, or indeed the complex access arrangements intended to defeat them that plagued the appeal system.

None of this negates the ongoing obligation to respond to a more specific demand for information which VOA can make of a ratepayer at any time during the year. Nor is the beneficiary of small business exemption exempt from all the same requirements, even though they pay no rates. Processing tens of thousands of additional annual returns, as I am told is the likely outcome, has not obviously been factored into all this, and the impact note’s suggestion of a £15 a pop cost to businesses seems to me a significant underassessment.

Picking up a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, there is also no guarantee that the VOA will act promptly either to advise of the likely implications of any change or, indeed, to implement them by changing the rateable value. To my mind, this is still an unnecessarily one-sided and open-ended arrangement, prone to arbitrary redefinition and, potentially, to equally arbitrary determination of claimed infractions. I do not see it as a necessary light touch; rather, as an additional and potentially burdensome obligation, possibly—although I hope not—involving two different gateways for reporting. That is what is actually set out in the Bill.

Clause 14 deals with the redefinition of material change of circumstances. Here, I am bound to say that I do not follow the logic: namely, that changes in statutory or regulatory measures should be taken as part of general market changes and reflected only at revaluations, although I note that the clause does not preclude taking account of changes of a physical nature or the state or locality of the hereditament meantime.

First, just about anything done by dint of administrative powers is by definition a child of statute. If, for instance, a vaping ban—which the Minister referred to and which I raised with her—renders a specific category of business unviable overnight, or, more typically, a low-emission zone, diesel vehicle ban or traffic management scheme is introduced that reduces retail footfall and mercantile activity at a stroke, is it right that this should be excluded from a definition of material change of circumstances?

For such matters to be disregarded, they should, first, apply to all businesses and, secondly, be disregarded only where a significant adjustment period has been allowed for business rate payers to take this into account. In all other cases save national emergency, the consequences for business rate yields should immediately be felt by the public sector that imposes them and not via this free-bet measure that transfers the entire risk on to businesses. I would be grateful if the Minister could elaborate on that point.

The Explanatory Notes’ suggestion at paragraph 37, that this will

“restore the law to its originally intended extent”,

is, I am afraid, simply not something I recognise. Plus, in my professional lifetime we have managed for over 50 years without there ever being an issue requiring such negation of materiality.

I will end my detailed points at this juncture, but I may well return at later stages of this Bill with amendments. I am bound to say that, whatever imagination may have been applied by the architects of this Bill, it has not been viewed from the standpoint of business, particularly as I perceive it from the briefing of the Shopkeepers’ Campaign and from professionals to whom I have talked.

If businesses need to count their fingers every time they figuratively shake hands with the Government on some taxation matter, we are in very negative territory. When the Government continue to claim that the postponement of the 2015 revaluation was “to give business certainty”, as repeated at paragraph 7 of the Explanatory Notes, it makes me cringe. Patently, it was all to do with maintaining tax yield. Businesses did get certainty—that is to say, the guarantee of continuing to pay business rates based on the peak value levels of 2008—but on sharply fallen values, reduced business activity and with substantially increased costs of trading. This was a misrepresentation, and everybody knows it. It is time for an attitude change.