Autumn Budget Preview: What Ratepayers Need to Know

In a week’s time, on 26th November, the Chancellor of the Exchequer will deliver their next Autumn Budget. Its likely contents have been the subject of much speculation over the last few weeks and months and equal amounts of anticipation and trepidation are now high across all areas of UK taxation policy.

With the country’s finances far from robust, this will be a pivotal moment, as the government seeks to balance fiscal constraint with economic growth, and business rates, as a major and stable source of local government revenue, will inevitably play a central role.

Being on the eve of the 2026 Revaluation, this Budget will include measures that will have a material bearing on the liability that ratepayers will be expected to pay from April. However, ratepayers will need to wait a further week or so for the Valuation Office Agency (VOA) to publish their draft valuations for individual properties before they will be able to accurately calculate that liability.

The Treasury has already clearly signalled its intention to introduce a completely new framework of multipliers and supplements in order to advance its overarching policy objectives of protecting the high street and supporting investment. However, much uncertainty remains in terms of how they ultimately intend to deploy this new framework in order to redistribute the overall burden across the various sectors, business sizes and geographies. As things stand, the intention is that all the support that will be delivered to retail, leisure and hospitality occupiers via reduced multipliers will be funded by the occupier of more valuable premises. And it remains to be seen whether the efforts of certain sectors, such as the food sector, have been successful in excluding their more valuable premises from the surcharge that will otherwise apply.

At the same time, with the revaluation likely to deliver significant increases in assessment valuations across many hereditaments, and especially for those occupiers operating in sectors whose 2023 valuations were impacted by the effects of Covid (such as those in the leisure sector in particular), it remains to be seen how generous any transitional relief scheme might be and, therefore, how much protection those ratepayers might expect to receive from what might otherwise be extremely significant year on year increases in liability.

As ever, Montagu Evans will issue our views on the day, and we will look to address the immediate known consequences of the announcements, and the likely concerns that will flow from them – look out in particular for an update to our Rating Handbook, the current version of which can be found HERE.

And once the VOA make public their draft valuations, we will be in a position to confirm with certainty what this will actually mean for ratepayers and what steps can and should be taken as we move towards the List going live in April, so those ratepayers are best placed to mitigate the impacts of both the revaluation and the Budget.