All Live Commercial
Properties and their Ratepayers
Upload Date - 01/02/2019
This information is about all live commercial properties and
their ratepayers; including: Property Address, Billing
Authority Reference Number, Property Description, Current Rateable
Value, Liable Party Name, Start Date of Liability, and Mailing
Address.
Commercial Accounts in Credit and Accounts where a
Credit has been Written-On
Upload Date - 01/02/2019
Worksheet 1:- Accounts in credit; including: Credit
Balance, Liable Party Name, Mailing Address and Account Start and
End Date.
Unfortunately, due to system limitations it is not possible to
provide in one sheet the account balances of ratepayers,
and information about the properties for which they are
liable; you will be able to discover details about these properties
by cross-referencing between the 'Accounts in Credit' worksheet and
the 'All Live Commercial Properties and their Ratepayers'
spreadsheet.
Worksheet 2:- Accounts which were in credit, and that credit was
written-on; including: Property Address, Billing Authority
Reference, Write-on Amount, Date of Write-on, Primary Liable
Party Name, Mailing Address and Account Start & End
Dates.
Worksheet two contains information about accounts which were in
credit, and that credit was written-on because some party had legal
means by which to reclaim the credit but this party could not be
traced. Credits written-on because no party had legal means to
reclaim them (for instances in some cases of bankruptcy) are not
included; if you wish to be supplied with this information, please
submit an FOIA request specifying this.
Exempt or Relieved Commercial
Properties
Upload Date - 01/02/2019
Unfortunately, due to system limitations, it is not possible to
provide in one sheet information about the exemptions and
reliefs of the properties, and information about the
ratepayers liable for these properties; you will be able to
discover the liable party for each property by cross-referencing
between the relevant worksheet in 'Exempt or Relieved Commercial
Properties' and the 'All Live Commercial Properties and their
Ratepayers' spreadsheet.
Worksheet 1:- Details of properties which are exempt from
business rates; including: Property Address, Property
Descriptions, Billing Authority Reference, Current Exemption,
Exemption Start Date, Rateable Value.
Worksheet 2:- Details of properties which receive relief from
Business Rates; including: Property Address, Property
Description, Billing Authority Reference, Current Rateable Value,
Relief Description, Percentage Relief Awarded, Start Date of
Relief.
It should be noted that some properties are 'relieved' in name
only (some empty properties for instance); ratepayers for these
properties experience 0% rate relief, and therefore they are not
included in the list. If you would like information about these
properties, please submit an FOIA request specifying this.
Please note that the percentage relief reported for properties
subject to small business rates relief are only estimates
calculated as set out on this
page of our website, note also that these estimates inevitably
include minor rounding errors. Whilst the Council does hold the
accurate percentage relief for each of the properties, our
reporting software is unfortunately not able to report this data
for multiple accounts. If you would like to request the percentage
relief for specific properties you may do so.
Additionally, you should note that where a relief is described
as "top up", this relief percentage can be summed with the other
type of relief (typically mandatory charity relief) for that
property to calculate the total percentage of relief.
Ratepayers Who Became Liable in the Last
Year
Upload Date - 01/02/2019
List of properties for which a business rate account has been
created in the last year; including: Property Address,
Property Description, Billing Authority Reference, Status
(live or not), Current Rateable Value, Liable Party Name, Liability
Start Date and Mailing Address.
Mailing Addresses
Unfortunately, (excluding sole-traders) roughly a quarter of
parties liable for business rates in our District have reported
their contact mailing address as the private personal address of a
representative of the organization. Naturally these data are
personal under the Data Protection Act 1998, and cannot be
disclosed; the difficulty in resolving this problem lies in
differentiating between personal and official addresses. For this
reason, in respect of the business rates information, we have put
in-place the following temporary solution, which will be
revised when we are satisfied that our rate-payers have had ample
opportunity to submit revised mailing addresses if they so
wish:
In all circumstances where the contact mailing address is the
same as the hereditament address, this is provided; where the
liable party is a sole trader, the word 'Redacted' is displayed in
the contact mailing address field; in all other cases the phrase
"Enquire Elsewhere" appears, this indicates that the Council holds
this information (namely: a mailing address at which the liable
party can be contacted) to be otherwise publicly available,
(notably by using the 'Information on Existing Companies' search
feature available on the
Companies House website). We apologise for this temporary
inconvenience.
Advice and Assistance
Ordinarily, when an FOI request is received which can
be wholly satisfied by information published on this
page, we will refer the applicant to this page without running
one-off reports for their request. Nonetheless, we welcome
requests for any advice and assistance you may require in
interpreting the data available here. We also
welcome requests which cannot be satisfied by the routinely
published information.
Information Held by the Valuation Office
With respect to current, property-specific, information, the
Council does not hold more information than the Valuation Office
Agency (VOA). The VOA register is
searchable at this address; in each case where
property-specific information is disclosed, the Billing Authority
reference number will be provided, which can be used to search the
register for details of the property. The Council regards any
information discoverable in this manner as reasonably accessible
and therefore exempt from disclosure under the FOIA by virtue of
section 21.
Migration Data
In December 2014 the Council transferred all business rates
information from a previous revenues system to the current one--a
process referred to here as migration.
Information on write-ons before December 2014 cannot be provided
due to migration. Accounts with a balance of £0.00 were given a
nominal balance of -£0.01 and this amount was 'written on' during
migration (this was a work-around for the problem of limited
interoperability). Accordingly, we do not consider these credits to
have been truly 'written on', and have excluded them from the list
of credits written-on; if you require this information please
submit an FOIA request specifying this.
Sole Traders' Personal Data
Identifying personal data relating to natural persons acting as
sole traders who pay business rates are not published on the ground
that publication would breach the first data protection principle
of the Data Protection Act 1998. The Council also considers this
information to be exempt from disclosure under an FOIA request,
under Section 40(3)(a)(i) of that Act. This conclusion
notwithstanding, all non-personal account information held about
sole traders is published, and personal data in any field is
replaced with the word "Redacted"; fields denoted thusly should be
taken as confirmation that the redacted information is
held; fields left blank should be interpreted as an indication
that the information is not held.
Zero Rateable Value Properties
Some properties in the district have a
rateable value of £0; while parties are technically 'liable' for
business rates in respect of these properties, they are not
actually liable for any fees (since none arise). For this reason
our practice is to exclude '0 RV' properties from requested and
proactively-published datasets. If you would like information
regarding '0 RV' properties, please submit an FOIA request
specifying this.
Properties without a Liable Party
Please note that we hold information about a small number of
commercial properties which we are currently investigating to
ascertain who is liable for their business rates. Due to the
limitations of our reporting software, we are not able to include
details of these properties in our reports, as we cannot report on
a property without an associated liable party. If you require
information about these properties please submit an FOIA request
specifying this; we will use other methods to retrieve the
information.
File-type
All reports are published in the MS Excel (.xls) file-type.
If you desire a report in an alternative file-type, please send a
request to Legal Services, stating the report and the file-type you
desire; wherever possible the Council will comply with your
request.