Business Rates and Crossrail - Have Your Say!

21st August 2009

Please Click Here to complete the survey. 

As the summer holidays draw to a close and the roads of south London once again take the strain of thousands of additional cars on the morning ‘school run’ our attention is drawn

to the debate around Crossrail – the Government’s new London railway, linking east and west London. We fully support investment in London’s railway network, and believe Crossrail

will benefit London. However, we are very concerned by the proposed supplementary business rate – an additional 2p (per pound rateable value) applied to all non domestic properties in London with a rateable value over £50,000 for a period of between 24 and 30 years – that will be used to fund the project. The announcement of an extra tax on business in the middle of a recession is unlikely to be welcomed by the business community. We will be urging the Mayor and Transport for London to consider other alternative funding methods, and would like to know what you think.

Through our website we are running an online survey to ask for your views and suggestions – which we will feed directly back to the Mayor.

This is an important issue for south London’s businesses and I am very keen to know what you think.

For more details please see below and the following links:

GLA proposals are set out in the initial prospectus available on http://www.london.gov.uk/crossrail-brs/docs/initial-prospectus.pdf ; a summary is also available at http://www.london.gov.uk/crossrail-brs/docs/summary.pdf .

Business rates: Non-domestic, or business, rates are the way in which businesses and other occupiers of non-domestic property contribute toward the cost of local authority services. (They may be included in your rent from your landlord)  http://www.voa.gov.uk/business_rates/index.htm

Crossrail is the new railway link for London and the South East, preliminary works have commenced and are continuing during 2009. Main construction will start in 2010. From 2017 Crossrail will travel from Maidenhead and Heathrow in the west to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east via new twin tunnels under central London. It will link Heathrow Airport, the West End, the City of London and Canary Wharf. http://www.crossrail.co.uk/

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