Speaking at the MA Leaders Club conference in London on Wednesday (4 March), Colliers head of business rates John Webber said the sector must maintain the pressure it applied ahead of last year’s Budget as it prepares for the 2029 revaluation.
“The Budget was seismic for the hospitality industry,” he told attendees.
“But there were some really important lessons from it. The way the industry came together, using lobbying, social media and coordinated pressure in a fairly aggressive way, was significant, and that’s something that needs to continue.
“The 2029 revaluation is only just over 12 months away, and the Valuation Office will start working on that in the next couple of months. So, while there’s been some relief for 2026, 2029 is heading our way very quickly.”
Webber explained the current approach to pub valuations still fails to properly reflect the realities of how pubs trade.
More careful
“The Valuation Office talks about ‘fair maintainable trade’. But fair to who? In many cases pubs actually overtrade compared with those assumptions, and that isn’t built properly into the valuation model,” he said.
“You’d think the Valuation Office would know what it’s doing by now, but I’m afraid they don’t.”
Colliers head of business rates also warned the next general election could have a major impact on how the next revaluation is handled.
He continued: “The 2029 rating list will become live about four months before the next election.
“Whichever way you look at it, Labour got burnt from the last Budget and revaluation; it was their undoing.
“So, if you think they got a kicking over this one, what they are going to be very careful of is not creating the same amount of bad publicity they had this time leading up to the next election.”
Massive spikes
He added because of this, the Government could be tempted to postpone the 2029 revaluation, though Webber told delegates this would not be a good thing for the sector.
Instead, he argued the industry should push for the revaluation to go ahead: “What the industry needs is certainty. You want that 2029 revaluation to go ahead, but you want it done properly, taking full account of what fair maintainable trade actually looks like.
“The danger is the current reliefs are very generous and they’re due to end in 2029. If the revaluation doesn’t happen, you’re back to waiting for a Chancellor in a future Budget to tell you what happens next and the last thing business want is uncertainty over [something so major].”
Webber also urged the sector to push for structural reforms to the system, including annual revaluations and self-assessment, as well as ‘35 by 35’, which he described as a roadmap to ensuring nobody is paying more than 35p for the business rates multiplier by 2035.
“Annual revaluations would go hand in hand with self-assessment. They would prevent the massive spikes we’ve seen under the current system.”
He added: “[35 by 35] would effectively take the system back to the level it was at in 1990, and there’s no reason why the multiplier should be any higher.”
