Over the last 9 months a number of amendments have been made to the Completion Notice regulations and appeal process to ensure property owners are paying more in business rates on vacant property. One area of the system that remains unchanged is that a Completion Notice must be served on a vacant new or refurbished property to bring it back into the Rating List unless it is fully fitted and ready for immediate occupation.  

With a warehouse, the absence of small power supply, partitioning in the office accommodation or a data/telecoms supply would render the property not 100% complete and therefore subject to the Completion Notice regime.

This follows the lead Upper Tribunal cases of Porter v Gladman Sipps (2011) and Aviva v Whitby (2014) which examined what features are integral to an office and a warehouse to be capable of immediate occupation. Rating case law is forever evolving with both the Valuation Office and Ratepayers looking to challenge certain principes, often principles that have been previously untested. Despite the previous Upper Tribunal decisions which determined that a Completion Notice must be served to bring a vacant property into the rating list unless capable of immediate occupation, the Valuation Office decided to re-test the principle in a recent case that went before the Valuation Tribunal. This most recent case was in respect of a warehouse property on Fairlie Road in Slough where small power hadn’t been installed by the Landlord in the warehouse area as part of their refurbishment scheme. The Valuation Tribunal found in favour of the developer and considered the building incomplete in the absence of small power and subject to the Completion Notice regime.