Business Rate Supplements Bill

These are two very important amendments and there have been two powerful arguments in explication. Amendment 48B seeks to ensure that the relief given for BRS is no less favourable than the relief given for the national business rate. We were certainly at pains to ensure that. In developing our proposals for BRS, we were particularly keen that the overall approach to BRS mirrored that for NDR. It is already provided for in Clause 13 and, to use the noble Baroness’s language, means that if a rate payer receives relief on their rates bill, that same level of relief will be applied when assessing liability to BRS. It is fully in line with NDR. I hope that reassures the noble Baroness on that point. We have designed the Bill so that the provision applies to those ratepayers in receipt of small business rate relief, charity or CASC relief, rural rate relief, discretionary rate relief or hardship relief. Those ratepayers will receive the same percentage reduction in their BRS bill as they receive from their rates bill. For example, if a registered community amateur sports club—I am sorry the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, is not in his place because I would like to see his face light up when I say this—is receiving 80 per cent mandatory relief from business rates, the club will similarly be entitled to an 80 per cent reduction in its BRS liability. I hope that will be helpful on the record. On Amendments 49 and 50, I listened hard to what the noble Lord said about the significance and impact of empty properties and empty shops, particularly on the young, and I quite understand the case that he is making. We should certainly do all that we can to support businesses during the current recession. I shall not go into the ways in which we have tried to do that, but an enormous sum of money has, in different ways, gone into supporting businesses, including the construction industry, during the current recession. It is on that basis that we are temporarily increasing the threshold at which the owner of an empty property becomes liable for business rates. This financial year, empty properties with a rateable value of less than £15,000 will be exempt from business rates. That is an estimated 70 per cent of empty properties. This is best targeted at helping those small businesses manage short-term pressures which are due to the difficult property market conditions. The reasons which led us to make the changes we did are still right in principle. It is right to charge rates when properties stand empty. It increases incentives and energy to re-let and reuse and it avoids subsidising owners of empty properties. The noble Lord will be disappointed, but a blanket exemption from BRS for empty properties is overly prescriptive. We need to ensure that we are consistent in the freedoms and flexibilities that we are offering local authorities.