How business rates are impacting our high street

We've done some in depth analysis on business rates in Newtown and how they fund and impact our local high street.

Business rates, or officially, non-domestic rates are a complicated system for local taxation which can be hard to understand. For residents, Council Tax is how we pay for local services, but those properties used as businesses or for non-domestic purposes also contribute to the system.

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In Wales, business rates are collected by local authorities and sent to Welsh Government, who then send back the money to councils. In Powys, the county council gets more money than Powys businesses send to Welsh Government. In 2019/20, Powys County Council sent Welsh Government £31.5m but got back £43.7m.

Each year, the Welsh Government set a figure called the business rates multiplier. It has been frozen in recent years, but now is due to increase with inflation in 2024.

We've delved into the Powys County Council datasets and pulled out some interesting stats for Newtown and the surrounding SY16 area.

Our research shows that nearly £7m is collected from non-domestic properties in the Newtown area, with a large proportion of properties having some kind of relief (discount). We've also built an interactive database of all non-domestic properties in the Newtown area. You can use this to view final bills and reliefs given to each individual property using the link below.

View the Newtown Business Rates Database

As the 2024/2025 Welsh Government budget is due to increase the business rates multiplier, this would increase the net amount collected to £7,344,025 - a whopping increase of £352k for businesses to find in these tough times. The budget also cuts relief for pubs, shops and restaurants from 75% to 40%.