Neil Amin Smith

The business rates retention scheme (BRRS) means that councils bear a proportion of the real-terms change in business rates revenues in their areas. When the BRRS was introduced in 2013–14, this proportion was up to 50%. However, since April 2017, the government has been piloting 100% retention of real-terms changes in business rates revenues in a number of areas of England. From April 2018, a further 10 areas are piloting 100% schemes. In this briefing note, we examine two questions. First, what are the financial implications of the pilots for different councils? In particular, what is the financial benefit to councils taking part in the pilots, and what does this imply for those councils not in pilot areas? Second, what can be learnt from these pilots? The government has explicitly set out what it hopes to learn, but how informative are the pilots actually likely to be?

This report argues that ongoing reforms to local government finance risk a growing funding gap for adult social care and conflict with efforts to provide consistent and high-quality care services across the country.

Recent years have seen big changes to the local government finance system. These include the ending of annual spending needs assessments and the introduction of the business rates retention scheme (BRRS) in 2013–14.

This report, jointly written by researchers at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), the Local Government Information Unit (LGiU) and PwC, looks at how the views of councils’ decision-makers relate to the characteristics of the councils they represent or work for.

Public sector pay has been squeezed since public spending cuts began to take effect from 2011, and it looks set to be squeezed even further up to 2020. However, this comes on the back of an increase in public sector wages relative to those in the private sector during the Great Recession. There is currently significant policy interest in the extent to which continued stagnation in public sector wages will affect the ability of the public sector to recruit and retain high-quality workers, although to date little is known about the potential effects.

The business rates revaluation, appeals and local revenue retention