Business Rates

Our lawyers

Our national team has wide-ranging experience and expertise in resolving business rates disputes and providing practical guidance on mitigation schemes, reliefs and exemptions.

Our experience

Our national team has wide-ranging experience and expertise in resolving business rates disputes and providing practical guidance on mitigation schemes, reliefs and exemptions.

From both a PR and financial perspective, it is imperative that an organisation carefully considers whether to make business rates appeals and employ mitigation strategies. The Courts have been inundated recently with rating cases so existing norms are changing. We keep on top of case law and new regulations to provide you with ways around the potential minefields.

Members of our team have:

• led on numerous Valuation Tribunal, Upper Tribunal and Court of Appeal actions on behalf of ratepayers, saving clients across a wide spectrum of sectors millions of pounds in business rates;
  
  
• successfully led a reported judicial review action in the High Court which upheld the lawfulness of a rates mitigation scheme based on storage. The case has had multi-million pound ramifications for ratepayers and local authorities;
  
  
• settled long-standing claims for investor clients who were involved unwittingly in a mitigation scheme, whereby a tenant would be placed into occupation of a property and then placed into insolvency;
  
  
• worked with developer clients to defend actions by local authorities for the recovery of rates when properties have been in the midst of renovation or reconstruction;
  
  
• settled the rating appeal for the single largest retail property in Europe, where £8m per annum was at stake and detailed arguments were put forward in relation to uniqueness, location, size, age and configuration.