Following the Chancellor\u2019s 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>
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>
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: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/business-rates-relief-schemes-2017-rebilling-progress<\/a><\/p> <\/p>"}
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