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The government has canceled a planned corporate tax hike next year but has ruled out a radical property tax reform, which has been criticized by some industry groups.

In his budget on Wednesday, Chancellor Rishi Sunak said he would provide businesses in England with an additional £ 7 billion in interest rate support over the next five years, on top of the £ 16 billion provided during the pandemic.

Corporate groups warned that the Chancellor missed the opportunity to reform tariffs when companies elsewhere were faced with rising costs and higher taxes.

About £ 4.6 billion of the new business rate aid will come from the freeze on the inflation component of the tax. The so-called multiplier usually rises annually with consumer prices, but was already frozen in the current tax year. This ban will now be extended until April 2023.

Another relief of 1.7 billion

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The remaining aid will be given to property owners doing improvement work or installing equipment to improve the energy efficiency of a building; you won’t see any increase in business rates for the following year.

The measures will provide some relief to companies already facing sharp increases in corporate tax and employers’ insurance until the next revaluation of taxable values ​​in 2023. These are combined with the multiplier to calculate the rates actually payable by a company.

The revaluation is based on current rents in 2021 and has been postponed by a year to better reflect the downward trend in rents across many industries.

Retail and hospitality executives said the multiplier freeze was welcome, but the £ 110,000 per company cap on the rebate meant many large companies would fall short.

“Just getting a small business discount won’t help Main Street or big businesses help them invest,” said Nick Mackenzie, general manager of Greene King brewery and pub operator. “I’m pretty disappointed with that”.

Jerry Schurder, director of corporate tariffs at consulting firm Gerald Eve, said many of the discounted premises were already tariff exempted due to the small business discount.

Chris Wootton, chief financial officer of retailer Frasers Group, said the corporate tariff system “continues to be very different from the real thing on the high street,” with tariff bills at the group’s 43 House of Fraser stores on average twice as high are the rent and not half as the current multiplier implies.

He cited a business in a provincial English town that has not paid rent since the chain was spun off in 2018, but is still liable for nearly £ 500,000 in business rates annually.

The Conservative government promised in its 2019 election manifesto to reduce the burden of business rates, but a Treasury Department review launched in March 2020 and completed in parallel with the budget effectively ruled out radical changes.

“We see little value in tearing up the system and starting over, as has been suggested by a small minority,” wrote Sunak in the foreword to the review, emphasizing the 25 billion this revenue to collect.

The government reiterated its intention to re-evaluate every three years instead of every five years, which will make the system more responsive to changes in rental market conditions.

The government also said it would deliberate on changes to the transition relief that would apply after the 2023 reassessment. The transitional relief is designed to offset the effects of sharp increases in taxable values, but it does so by limiting the effects of falls.

Helen Dickinson, chief executive of the British Retail Consortium, said the proposed changes “lag behind the truly fundamental reform that has been required and promised” and “do little to support the companies that pay two-thirds of retail tariffs and “Employing 1.5 million people”.

Tony Danker, Director General of the CBI, said: “This budget alone will not seize the moment and change the UK economy for a post-Brexit-post-Covid world.

“Businesses stay in a high-tax, low-productivity economy and worry about inflation. But the budget will have a positive impact on the economy as a whole and will make several changes that UK businesses will welcome. “

Federation of Small Businesses national chairman Mike Cherry said there are some measures that should help halt the current decline in confidence in small businesses.

“But, with costs rising, supply chain disruptions, and labor shortages, is there enough here to implement the government’s vision for a low-tax, high-productivity economy? Unfortunately not. When it comes to inflation and upcoming tax hikes, the clouds are gathering. “