Increasing business rates revenue in Nottingham

Regular matching

In 2016 the GIS team ran an analytical project to identify missing business rate through data matching and spatial data analysis of organisation data entitled Maximising local taxation revenues in Nottingham’. The data held in this report was passed to the Corporate Counter Fraud Team (CCFT) to investigate potential ‘unbilled' properties within the City. As a result, NDR revenue was increased by £148k. The project was repeated in 2018 and resulted in extra liability of around £202k from previously unrated properties.

Updated process

After a gap during COVID, a further report was obtained from the GIS team in 2022 that contained details of address that appear on other datasets within the authority (namely commercial waste, food licencing, alcohol licencing and the workplace parking levy) but that appeared to have no corresponding NNDR (National Non Domestic Rates) account for the assigned UPRN.

As a result, a total of 799 matches were identified but this was narrowed down to 483 once previously checked records had been discounted. The data was then checked against existing NNDR records to ensure that the property did not exist under a different UPRN and this accounted for the vast majority of cases (this is based on initial UPRN allocated before a property is potentially subdivided or adopting a slightly different address).

Where NNDR records did not show an alternative UPRN, further desktop enquiries were made, largely based around open intelligence e.g. web trace, local media, social media, local planning records. Following this, properties were subsequently visited by CCFT and the occupants spoken to.

25 matches were flagged for further investigation by CCFT and have been visited. This has resulted in 6 properties being referred to the Valuation Office Agency (VOA) for rating.

Analysis

Five properties have been brought back into rating and have been billed a total of £574,913.23 to end of 2023.

The CCTF team are awaiting the VOA rating for last referral. This project has again proved fruitful in securing extra current and future NNDR revenue for the authority CCFT plan to undertake repeat exercises biennially.

Future matching

To calculate benefits previous additional revenues were averaged to provide an estimate of future expectations. The estimated costs incurred included the GIS team effort, validation by CCTF and the collection (conservatively estimated at 50% of the revenue). This calculation provided the estimate of net benefits

Value

Discounting the net benefits from a baseline in 2022 the total impact over the period 2018-2026 was estimated at £6.2 million.

As a sensitivity test on the robustness of the estimates, the study has calculated the effect of no further uncollected revenue being identified. The total discounted impact would be reduced to £5.4 million - still a substantial positive impact.

This case study appears alongside several other case studies in a report on a return investment analysis that was carried out with Nottingham City Council.