REFORMING THOSE RATING APPEALS

Professional Services News

No one particularly likes paying business rates. More than anything else, they don’t like paying too much.

But it happens, sometimes for all sorts of complex reasons related to the way the property you occupy has been valued by the Valuation Office.  It has always been an issue, but a new breed of so-called rating specialists who wander the round the country telling anyone who’ll listen that they can save them money has brought it into sharp focus.

The result? The appeals system has become clogged up, usually with appeals which won’t achieve anything.

In some cases, these rating “specialists” are little better than ambulance chasers. They win the work, get the fee, but don’t deliver results – they deliver poor value for clients and do nothing to help clear up an appeals system which is difficult enough as it is.

Recently, FHP have been involved in a consultation on how we can reform the appeals process which is long overdue. It isn’t just a huge volume of appeals that is a problem – there is a lack of information flowing between the Valuation Office, the people who pay business rates and the surveyors who represent the rate payers. 

In my view the Valuation Office isn’t helping itself, though. It could be a lot more transparent about how it works, the way valuations are arrived at and how the whole process works. This would remove a lot of the misunderstandings while also making it more obvious that a lot of the “ambulance chasing” serve no useful purpose.

Something like 30 per cent of the UK’s 1.8 million valuations are appealed, and three-quarters of those appeals result in no change to the rateable value. The ambulance chasers don’t really care because they’ve earned their fee. But the system is suffering which affects everyone.

There is only one shot at an appeal. That is why, at FHP, we operate on a no-win, no-fee basis.  We back ourselves to be successful, that is the way it should be.

We’ve been involved in the consultations about how the appeals process can be reformed because we’ve got decades of experience (including surveyors who’ve worked for the Valuation Office) and we believe both sides have a responsibility to drive improvement.

There are plenty of cases where occupiers are quite right to question their rates, but it takes experience to work out why.

We want a system that works, a system that isn’t being abused, and one that is fair to the people paying the rates.