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<p>Following the Chancellor’s announcement of the Business Rates Relief Schemes at
the Budget, on 9 March the Department published a Business Rates Information Letter
to local authorities. This provided information on each of the three schemes including
draft allocations for the discretionary relief scheme and guidance on the Supporting
Small Business Scheme. On 10 March the Department began discussions with a group of
local authorities and the main software suppliers to discuss the implementation of
the schemes and system requirements.</p><p>The Department has continued to engage
local authorities and software suppliers, encouraging authorities to speed up implementation
and publishing the technical guidance for the Supporting Small Business Scheme and
Pubs Relief Scheme on 20 June. However, local authorities have overall responsibility
for awarding and maintaining contracts with their software providers and for ensuring
value for money. While authorities have been able to manually identify eligible businesses
for the Supporting Small Business Scheme since March, some authorities chose to wait
for a full software update that enabled them to automate this process.</p><p>I met
software providers on 12 July and agreed that the software update would be provided
to authorities by 21 August at the latest. The update was released by all of the main
software providers by this date. On 14 September I made a Written Ministerial Statement,
which set out the good progress made by some authorities and a commitment to publish
a list of authorities that have rebilled across all three schemes. This has now been
published and is available at: <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/business-rates-relief-schemes-2017-rebilling-progress"
target="_blank">https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/business-rates-relief-schemes-2017-rebilling-progress</a></p><p>
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