Britain will proceed with a revaluation of business properties from April 2023 to calculate new levels of property tax, but provide temporary support to limit the impact of surging inflation, finance minister Jeremy Hunt said on Thursday. Hunt said he would soften the blow on businesses with a 13.6 billion pound ($16.1 billion) support package over the next five years, he told parliament during the presentation of his autumn statement.
"Nearly two thirds of properties will not pay a penny more next year and thousands of pubs, restaurants and small high street shops will benefit," he said. Hunt added that a new government funded Transitional Relief scheme would benefit around 700,000 businesses.
Overall, business rates would rise by less than 1 percent, compared with more than 20 percent without a change in policy, the finance ministry said.
Britain’s economy is forecast to shrink next year, Hunt said as he began outlining how he and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will raise taxes and cut spending to repair the public finances, despite the grim outlook.
The new forecast is for gross domestic product to contract by 1.4 percent next year compared with a projection for growth of 1.8 percent in the previous outlook published in March by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).
Hunt said the OBR forecasts laid out "starkly the impact of global headwinds on the UK economy" as he started a speech to parliament on Thursday.
Hunt and Sunak have said they will restore investor confidence in Britain after the failed "Trussonomics" experiment with unfunded tax cuts that sent the pound to an all-time low against the U.S. dollar, threatened chaos in the housing market and forced Truss to quit after just 50 days in Downing Street.
Hunt said the OBR judged that Britain – where high inflation is creating a cost-of-living crisis – is already in recession. It is the only Group of Seven nation yet to recover its pre-pandemic size, having previously suffered a decade of near-stagnant income growth.
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