The Scottish Government has rejected north-east calls to postpone the deadline for business rate appeal proposals.
Property industry experts have warned their clients are facing an “extremely unfair” shortened window of opportunity for getting them in.
There have also reported “numerous” crashes of the website set up for people to do so.
The most recent outage lasted more than a week, with the deadline for submissions just weeks away.
Looming cut-off
This year, following recent changes to the system, all proposals against revised valuations and rates must be lodged by July 31 – two months earlier than normal.
The website is now back up and running but outages have left people fuming.
Eric Shearer, partner at Knight Frank in Aberdeen, offloaded his frustrations about the latest crash on social media.
He said: “We are only a month away from the deadline to appeal our business rates assessments and the tool through which we make those appeals is broken.
“No notification or apology.”
Mr Shearer added: “The timescales for rating appeals were already unrealistic.
“They are now impossible as 100 hour-plus has been lost at this critical time.
“The Scottish Government needs to step in and extend the deadline by at least a month to allow ratepayers to have their appeals lodged.”
As of April 1 2023, the appeal process has changed to a two-stage process.
A proposal must first be submitted for review by assessors. If an agreement is not reached, an appeal can then be lodged with the first tier of the Tribunal for Scotland.
Richard Lang, a partner for Ryden in Aberdeen, said: “The legislation changes are extremely unfair on the ratepayer by making the ability to appeal more complex and more expensive, and also by reducing the window for submitting an appeal from six months to four.
“The new system was intended to enable a period for the negotiation of proposed values leading up to April 1 2023.
Short-staffing woes
“Ryden’s experience has been that, due to being short-staffed, the assessor departments in Grampian and Highland were unable to negotiate or consider the vast majority of evidence submitted to them prior to the proposed values becoming fixed on April 1.”
Mr Lang added: “Since April 1 there have been numerous instances of the Scottish Assessors Association website crashing.
“This has effectively reduced further what was already a very short period for submitting alternative proposals by ratepayers, or on their behalf.”
An extension to the period during which proposal appeals can be submitted is essential if ratepayers are to be dealt with in a just manner.”
Richard Lang, Ryden.
Ryden’s partner continued: “The amount of information that must be submitted with a proposal appeal is much greater than was required to be submitted in an appeal at previous rating revaluations.
“It is an entirely new appeal system for both the assessor departments and rating practitioners to get used to.
Logic questioned
“The logical consequence should have been a period longer than six months during which proposals could be submitted, not a shortening of the period.
“An extension to the period during which proposal appeals can be submitted is essential if ratepayers are to be dealt with in a just manner.”
A government spokesman said there were “no plans to amend the deadline” despite the “temporary inconvenience” of website crashes.
Conversation