Jac Roper looks at changes in business rate appeals; Nestle rewards (or lack of); and GPS bugs
Preston-based chartered surveyor Ken Batty, who has spent a lot of his lifetime trying to weed out the cowboys that unfortunately plague his profession, has sent me an email detailing some coming changes in business rate appeals.
He writes: “There is a major change coming – not yet law but on its way and that is that the onus in the future for ratepayers to declare any alterations to their premises be it in the form of physical alterations, in the form of alterations to their lease where they lease them etc. must as a duty be notified to the Valuation Office Agency.
“Previously there has been no legal requirement to notify and usually any alterations would be dealt with when either a re-inspection was made or during an appeal so it is a very important change and with it there are penalties for those who do not notify of a change within 60 days when it does become law.
“Further there is a proposal again to become law that every year each ratepayer will have to make a declaration confirming that during the year there have been no alterations. Again wrongful, false or withheld information will be the subject of a penalty.”
He explains that this latter system will be similar to the confirmation statement that has to be made for limited companies each year via Companies House but this will apply to both individuals and limited companies, in fact every ratepayer.
And he adds: “The reason why it is important that your readership be made aware of this is that we can only see this is another opportunity for yes… here we go again… the cowboys to make play of this and try to persuade parties that it is a very complex matter thus creating the need for considerable and excessive fees which should not apply.
“Any party requiring advice on this need not fall prey to cowboy firms as any genuine rating practitioner (certainly we would do this) would just either not make a charge if was very straightforward or where matters may seem a little more complex simply make a reasonable and nominal charge rather than the avaricious and draconian charges that the charlatans would make – please make your readership aware of this before they are caught.”
Ken also drew my attention to the fact that the notorious RVA Surveyors are now in Insolvency. We both doubted anyone would mourn their passing but if any forecourt has currently used this company and is still hoping for results, then give me a call and I’ll put you in touch with Ken and he will sort it out for you.
Where are my rewards?
All this one took was a nudge. Valli Patel, who runs Westvale Service Station in Halifax, West Yorkshire, emailed to say: “We have not seen a Nestlé rep since last October. We are in the Nestlé reward scheme but we have not had a visit since last year. We do not have any contact number.”
Valli asked me whether I could find out a contact number for the scheme from any other retailers but I decided the best route was to go to the company itself.
So I contacted Nestlé and received the following comment: “We operate a rewards programme in the convenience channel which is working well for the majority of our customers so we were disappointed to hear about Mr Patel’s experience.
“We cannot disclose details about individual customer queries but I can confirm we are investigating the complaint thoroughly.”
I got in touch with Valli again to send him the response and to ask whether anyone had contacted him from Nestlé and he confirmed that they had.
Wish they were all that easy to fix.
Getting their GPS in a twist
Last month I wrote about Jon Brownsey’s “interesting situation” whereby customers with certain cards were seeing that they had paid ‘Fordingbridge Fire Station’ instead of ‘Fordingbridge Service Station’. (Jon said: “I have even had some of the retained firefighters from the fire station checking with me that they haven’t paid themselves!”)
This prompted an email from Tina Diebner who is the site manager for a BP Garage in Launceston, Cornwall called Greenaways BP.
She wrote: “I read your article with interest. Recently NatWest customers (including my daughter who works here) have noticed that the name has changed on their bank statements to Greenaways Tyre & Exhaust Centre, which is a completely different company around the corner from us. Merchant services and BP don’t know why this has happened.”
Her message to Jon was: “Thought you would be interested to know it’s not just you.”
And Jon replied: “That’s really interesting – obviously the location software that this third party company are using has a few bugs in it.”
Yep, it’s got its GPS in a twist.
In Jon’s case it turned out to be down to Ethoca (owned by Mastercard) which confirmed that once they were made aware (by NatWest) of the error, it was quickly corrected.
I did offer to chase the problem up for Greenaways but I think they are handling it themselves.
You can email your queries, news and views to Jac@roper-biz.co.uk or call 0208 8502 9775
