Commercial Properties
Case reference FOI2019/00061
Published 12 June 2019
Request
Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, please can you send me in excel (or similar) format the following information: A list of commercial properties within your councils area with the following information: • VOA Reference Number • VOA Property Description • Business Name / Occupier Details • Current Rateable Value • Occupation Date • Full Address and Postcode • Details of any Reliefs that each property is receiving • Relief Amount • Date Relief Applied I would like to receive both Limited and Sole Trader information and as stated before would request this information in Microsoft Excel or similar format.
Response
As you made your request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 the format of this response is formal in order to meet our legal requirements.
Guildford Borough Council publishes information regarding business rates on its website. This includes most of the details you have requested, and you can find the files at https://www.guildford.gov.uk/bratesdata along with an explanation of the contents.
The following information is not available:
Occupation Date and Relief Start dates are not available as we do not hold them as a separate item of information on our records. To identify them would be a manual exercise and would involve someone looking up every account, checking back to see when liability or relief started for each property on the account, and working out if it is continuous. We are not required to create new information in order to answer a Freedom of Information request, but in any case I estimate this exercise would greatly exceed the cost limit set out in Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.
As the information that is available is already in the public domain I consider this information to be exempt from disclosure on request under Section 21 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 as it is already available elsewhere.
Documents
This is Guildford Council's response to a freedom of information (FOI) or environmental information regulations (EIR) request.
You can browse our other responses or make a new FOI request.