The HFW Client Briefing: Ports & Terminals Group - August, 2009

Business Rates - Where Are We Now?

In our article, Bureaucratic maze awaits challenges to UK ports rates¹, published in Lloyds List on Monday 15 December 2008, we highlighted the difficulties facing port businesses resulting from the badly considered and poorly implemented introduction of uniform business rates to the statutory ports. At that point, few businesses had become insolvent. Since then, the credit crunch and recession have fuelled an already weak economic situation. Sadly, port businesses particularly now find themselves targeted by insolvency practitioners offering their services. Having discovered that a very dull tax can have huge implications for the viability of a business, port businesses need to be wary of accepting "quick and easy insolvency solutions" which may not be appropriate to their business model.