Portsmouth City Council has access to limited funds from government to finance the COVID-19 Additional Relief Fund (CARF). It is anticipated that relief allocations will be restricted to a certain percentage, which means that businesses who qualify are likely to still have some business rates to pay.
Subject to eligibility conditions, relief will be awarded within each business sector, in line with the funding allocation methodology defined by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities, in the distribution of grant allocations to billing authorities responsible for billing business ratepayers. This allocation methodology uses the change in Gross Value Added (GVA) as proxy for the economic impacts of COVID-19 on each business sector.
Whilst Portsmouth City Council is responsible for designing the local CARF scheme, in developing and implementing the scheme, billing authorities:-
- Must not award relief to a ratepayer who for the same period of the relief either receives or would have been eligible for the Expanded Retail Discount, which covers retail, hospitality and leisure sectors, or the Nursery Discount.
- Must not award relief to a hereditament for a period when it is unoccupied, other than temporary periods of closure associated with local or national restrictions, under which the hereditament continues to be classified as occupied for the purposes of business rates.
- Should direct their support towards ratepayers who have been adversely affected by the pandemic and have been unable to adequately adapt to that impact.
- In line with the legal restrictions in section 47(8A) of the Local Government Finance Act 1988, billing authorities may not grant the discount to themselves or to a precepting authority.
- To be eligible for the relief, the applicant must be a ratepayer liable for and occupying the property for which business rates is charged during the financial year 2021/22, for a period of 1 day or more.
- If there is no business rates liability to pay due to the award of full small business rates relief, no further relief will be payable.
- Portsmouth City Council reserve the right to apply further mechanisms to determine eligibility at its discretion.
The Application Process
To apply for CARF the ratepayer will be required to complete an online application form, which can be found through our online form. Please note that paper application forms will not be made available.
For the application to be considered, we may require additional evidence. This is likely to be in the form of accounts/bank statements/management accounts for both the financial year 2021/22 and previous years. Where further information is needed, the applicant will be contacted.
Application Deadlines
There is a set limited budget provided by government for this relief scheme. Once the fund has been fully utilised the CARF scheme will end unless the city council is provided with additional funding by the government.
All applications must be made by 30 September 2022. Any application received after this date will not be accepted. Applications will however be determined in tranches at the end of March 2022, April 2022, May 2022, June 2022 and September 2022.
Subsidy Allowance
All reliefs under the CARF are required to be compliant with the subsidy allowance requirements.
How much relief will be provided to successful applicants
Portsmouth City Council have access to limited funding from government for this scheme, and the award of relief will be determined by business sector in accordance with the funding distribution methodology used to provide funding allocations to billing authorities administering the CARF.
The relief will be awarded as a reduction to the business rates account. Where this creates an overpayment of business rates, and the business rates account becomes in credit, any credit will be refunded.