Business rates revaluation ‘Reval23’ – many small retailers will be worried

Business rates revaluation ‘Reval23’ – many small retailers will be worried

Many small retailers will be approaching the Rates Revaluation 2023 with trepidation, says Retail NI.

Finance Minister, Conor Murphy announced a revaluation of all 74,750 non-domestic properties.

Known as ‘Reval2023’, this process will result in a new non-domestic Valuation List being used to calculate business rate bills from April 2023.

Following the announcement Retail NI Chief Executive Glyn Roberts said: “There is no doubt of the positive contribution, Minister Murphy and his department has made in delivering support grants and a rates holiday to many of our members during this pandemic”

“However, given their negative experience of the last rates revaluation, many independent retailers and small business owners will no doubt approach the 2023 Reval with trepidation”

“The last Reval in 2020 resulted in many independent retailers seeing increases of between 20-40% in their rate bills and actually reduced rates liability for large out of town supermarkets.”

“Tesco Knocknagoney, a huge out of town superstore, which has an unfair competitive advantage with its location over town centre traders, with free car parking, no traffic attendants and a public transport link, actually received a reduction of 15%”

“At a meeting with the Minister this week, we urged him to ensure that these mistakes are not repeated with the 2023 Reval and to begin a wider reform of our dysfunctional, antiquated and broken system of business rates”

Covid impact

Minister Murphy said: “Reval2023 will maintain fairness and ensure businesses are paying rates which take account of the impact of the pandemic.”

“Since April 2020, I have provided over £500 million of additional business rates support, with many businesses paying no rates at all over two years. The Executive has also provided significant financial support to businesses in the form of grants.”

Land & Property Services will begin collecting property information from business ratepayers later this year. This important information will form a database of new rental values as at 1 October 2021, instead of the current 2018 values, and will be used in assessing new rateable values for every property.

Reval2023

Reval2023 means LPS (Land & Property Services) will be revaluing all business properties in Northern Ireland. The new values will be used to calculate rate bills for businesses. The Department of Finance says the revaluation will ensure that the rating system stays up-to-date, reflects local economic changes and makes the system fairer by redistributing rate liability fairly across all sectors in line with changes in market rental values.

The last revaluation of business properties in Northern Ireland was in 2020 and saw many business property rates hiked up – while out of town superstore Tesco Knocknagoney got a reduction of 15%. Previous to that, the 2015 revaluation was based on April 2013 rental values.

Reval 2023 is intended to ‘ensure that the rating system remains closely aligned to market values for business ratepayers and that the new revaluation is completed within a five year period.’

The reality is it could put many small town and city centre businesses in jeopardy.

Neighbourhood Retailer

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