Digitalising Business Rates

We submitted our response to the Government’s consultation on digitalising business rates. While we are supportive of Government’s efforts to streamline and modernise the business rates system we expressed some concern with the scope of the project. In particular, we don’t believe this new digital database will be the right way to address the challenges with reliefs. This can only be resolved through more frequent revaluations and a more sustainable tax burden. We are also concerned that there are a number of other areas of the business rates system which are in desperate need of digitalisation which are not covered by these proposals.