Dear All,
This is IMPORTANT, and effects all of us.
CLICK HERE to see how you are effected
You may remember back in 2015 we vociferously fought the 400% rent increases in White Lion Square being forced, in our opinion quite unreasonably, by Welwyn and Hatfield Council upon local businesses. Our thanks to Welwyn and Hatfield Times and Three Counties Radio, for their support.
At the time we were keen to point out that this increase was a cynical attempt by the Council to increase business rates on all businesses across Welwyn and Hatfield. As of 2017 The Council will receive all business rates, these are no longer shared with Central Government. Needless to say there is a complex, job creating, admin hungry formular, for calculating this.
Well this has now come home to roost.
Here is the latest sample data released this week CLICK HERE To see how YOU WILL BE EFFECTED
Double Click on the Image to enlarge.
There are 2885 businesses in Welwyn and Hatfield with a rateable value. We have all this data and across the whole Country
The column marked 2017 Rateable value will be the RV as of April 2017
The column to the right is the current RV with the right hand column showing the increase as a % of the current value.
The data is ordered from highest increase downwards.
We have excluded the individual business and building numbers.
What you can see is increases from around 200% to 400%.
But it is far worse than that. If your RV is currently less than £6000 small business rate relief means that you pay no Rates at all. Between £6,000 and £12,000 there is a linear increase up to the full rateable value. You then pay based upon the poundage set by the council each year.
Look at the data for Market place Hatfield, these local businesses have in general moved from an RV of around £6000 to one of over £12,000. So their rates will go from nothing to say 42% of £15,000 namely £6,300 pa. That is an extra £500 per month. That is a lot of extra sandwiches every day.
It should also be realised that these businesses probably pay a higher rent because the premises have historically attracted no rates. Welwyn and Hatfield Council; should recognise that it is these businesses that create employment and pay their salaries, and start acting on behalf of the community, not as a millstone round its neck.
But it gets worse!!!
At a time when Theresa May, with a post Brexit opportunity to deliver ” A fairer Deal for Everyone” The bureaucrats at the Valuation Office are busy stitching up smaller businesses.
What is clear from the data across the country is that Larger Businesses are recieving reductions in their RV’s. WHY? because they have access to surveyors who can argue at a Land Tribunal in the High Court, that Rents are significantly down on those in 2005, therefore Rateable Values should be less. The VO knows they would win, so they have increased the assessments on smaller businesses who do not have the ability to defend themselves.
How much longer are we going to stand by and watch an increasingly ineffecient and ineffective public sector take more and more from the people that generate the wealth, restricting their growth, to deliver increasingly shoddy and irrellevant services, whilst spending our money to build themselves new offices and a completely unneccesary Council Chamber?
This is exactly what Brexit was about. Not racism, little Englanders or any of those insults, it was about the customers, our communities saying NO to the increasing incompetence in public service delivery. From controlling our borders to training our children, to waste collection, and health provision, to protecting our children from institutionalised abuse, then saying “Its not us its Europe”. Youth Mental Health issues are rocketing as a direct consequence.
Would it be too much to ask for the Treasury and the Bank of England to start producing some numbers that look forward to a brighter world, that spell out the steps of how to get there? Maybe they just don’t have the necessary skills or inclination, in which case we should stop paying them, and get someone useful in to solve the problem. That is exactly what businesses do.
The problem is simple, our public sector people completely lack the skills to cope with a changing world. This is why they have done everything they can, including lying to the British people, to maintain the Status Quo, or more accurately their overpaid jobs. Given the need to repay our national debt, it is quite important that the people who created the debt by overpaying themselves are not in charge of reducing that same debt. I ask this for the sake of our children and theirs, who these people have comprehensively robbed in our life time.
Theresa May. – Over to You – We are watching.
Leave a Reply