Revenue raised from proposed short-term measures designed to make the north’s rates regime more progressive will represent a small fraction of the money already owed by businesses and householders, according to the leader of Stormont’s opposition.
Earlier this month, Finance Minister Caoimhe Archibald set out a “roadmap for rates” that initially aims to raise an additional £9m.
The plan includes raising the cap on rates bills that applies to around 8,000 more expensive homes across the region. The minister proposes raising the valuation at which the cap applies from £400,000 to £485,000, raising around an additional £2m in revenue.
She also hopes to reduce the discount for paying rates bills early from 4% to 2%, an incentive that more than 163,000 ratepayers availed of last year.
The proposed reduction in the discount to 2% would generate a further £4 million annually for the Stormont executive.
The measures are to be put out for public consultation in January.
In an a written assembly question, SDLP MLA Matthew O’Toole asked the finance minister to detail the anticipated revenue that would be raised.
In February, it emerged that there was £174.3m of unpaid rates up to March 31 2023, an increase of £21m on the previous year.
It meant around 10% of rates in Northern Ireland went unpaid in the 2022/23 financial year.
In her response, Ms Archibald said the short-term measures subject to consultation are “aimed at enhancing the progressivity of the tax and not revenue raising alone”.
She said the anticipated £9m that would be raised by the measures represented 0.59% of the £1.5bn raised annually, once various reliefs were deducted.
The minister said the value of unpaid rates that remain payable “changes daily and remains subject to ongoing billing, collection and recovery procedures” but that £9m equated to 53.25% of the “amount written off as uncollectable for legal, legislative and administrative reasons during 2023/24″.
Mr O’Toole said the finance minister’s figures revealed “not just the stubbornly high level of uncollected rates” but also what he termed the “puny sums” that would be raised from the strategic review.
“The total additional £9m promised amounts to less than 1% of overall rates raised and less than ten per cent of the stock of uncollected rates,” the Opposition leader said.
“Most strikingly, the additional sums raised from the finance minister’s heavily hyped review are barely half the amount the department writes off each year.”
The South Belfast and North Down MLA said the proposed measures would raise “trivial amounts” and “do nothing about uncollected rates”.
