[2023] UKUT 217 (LC)

The claimant claimed the net amount of the business rates which it had been required to pay as owner of the Cheshire Lounge between June 2017 and the end of March 2022. The total sum claimed was £24,147.

The way in which this claim was originally put was that the claimant had been prevented by difficulties over access from adopting its normal course which would have been to demolish a property which it had acquired for redevelopment as soon as it completed the acquisition. Had it been able to do so it would have avoided paying business rates on the Cheshire Lounge. Instead, in September 2017 the claimant appointed a rating surveyor to advise it on rates mitigation measures and to negotiate with Cheshire East Council. This eventually achieved the desired result when the property fell into such a dilapidated condition that it was removed from the rating list altogether in December 2019.

There was no contemporaneous evidence of how the claimant might have gone about redeveloping the Cheshire Lounge site and Mrs Ramsbottom did not refer to its intentions in her written evidence. Reliance was instead placed by Mr Cook on an email and a letter Mrs Ramsbottom had written to him when he was preparing his evidence in December 2022 and again in March 2023 when she responded to a number of points made by Mr Kershaw in his first report. At that time the claimant’s case was that it and its contractors had been physically prevented from getting to the site (Mrs Ramsbottom informed Mr Cook that “[w]e could not undertake the demolition works in isolation as we were not able to gain access to the site for works”). We are satisfied on the evidence we heard that there was never any physical impediment to the claimants having access over the new road and that temporary barriers erected by National Highways’ contractors to discourage trespass (the site was used for a period by travellers) were removed on the infrequent occasions when access was requested.

In her oral evidence Mrs Ramsbottom explained that the claimant’s preference would have been to demolish the building as part of a single construction contract. But she had also been concerned that if the site was demolished and there was a delay in redevelopment the planning permission might lapse and might be difficult to obtain again because the site was in the green belt. No contractors had been lined up ready to begin the development when the acquisition was completed in June 2017, and at the only other site which the claimant had acquired and then demolished it had taken 12 months for work to begin.

The claimant was free to demolish the Cheshire Lounge in June 2017 if it had wanted to. We do not accept that greater certainty over the grant of easements would have led to a different outcome. Initially at least, as Mrs Ramsbottom explained, the claimant completed the acquisition in the expectation of taking two years to resolve the access issue and it was relaxed because it still needed to engage in the detailed design of the proposed development and select a contractor and professional team. There was no settled practice about how a development would proceed, and in this case a choice must have been made not to demolish the building while the necessary preliminary work was being undertaken. We accept that there would have been a legitimate concern about losing the benefit of planning permission until eventually in March 2020 sufficient works were undertaken on the site (by forming the bell-mouth entrance to the intended car park) to implement the consent. But that work was done without any formal arrangement with the Tatton Estate or National Highways being required, or Mrs Ramsbottom herself being involved, and we can see no reason why a demolition contractor could not have had the same free access to the site at an earlier date if required.

We therefore reject the claimant’s case that it should be compensated for an inability to demolish the Cheshire Lounge and mitigate its liability for rates.