15 March 2019 
Jane Harrison-White, Executive Director
As Gerald Eve say on their website, “The 2017 business rates revaluation has been a major cause for concern for companies across the UK. In addition to the tax changes, commercial property owners are also having to navigate new challenges in the way liabilities are managed and appealed.” Universities in England and Wales are no exception to this. Hopes that universities, through UniversitiesUK, could negotiate centrally, as they had for many years with the Valuation Office, were dashed part-way through a project to deliver a memorandum that would apply across the sector.
The warning bells that this was effort in vain perhaps should have sounded earlier than they did, but in May 2018, the sector concluded centrally-managed efforts to allow a representative sample of institutions to work with agents to understand its new procedure for English rating assessments. The process known as Group Pre-Challenge Review (GPCR) took effect from April 2018. It provides a more defined negotiation process under the new Check, Challenge, Appeal (CCA) regime. The VOA confirmed that once an agreed valuation scheme for HEIs has been finalised through the GPCR process, the scheme will be applied to all English HEIs as part of the VOA’s response to a Check.
Gerald Eve, the lead agent, anticipates that negotiations all elements of agreement will complete by the end of March 2019 and will be confirmed by the VOA by 5 April. Once the GPCR outcome has been issued, the VOA has until 12 April to clear all the participant checks following which each will need to be subject to a challenge by 13 May. Once these challenges have been settled between the VOA and the relevant consultant the GPCR will have been concluded and the revised valuation scheme will then be applied by the VOA for any future checks submitted. This is anticipated to be from summer 2019.
Further information setting out the history of this project is available on the AUDE and BUFDG websites, along with this month’s latest update.
