We’ve just received this message from a business consultant client.

I’m deciding which country I want to visit with the £10k my local authority is going to send me next week! Hehe.  That’s the starter for 10, I was going to lay XX and YY off so guess gov’t will compensate me for keeping them on.

He’s raised a couple of points here, the £10K grant funding (item 7 in our last message) and support for laid off/’furloughed’ workers (item 1 in our last message).

He operates out of a small office which has a business rateable value of less than £15K (you can check your rateable value here) which means it qualifies for small business rates relief and so he will get a £10,000 non-repayable grant.

No need to apply; his local authority will pay out automatically ‘as quickly as possible’, according to most local authority websites.  It’s anticipated that the lucky ones should receive their £10K by the end of April.

Giving a bung to everyone who claims small business rates relief is a very crude system of support, which does has the virtues of being both easy to operate and allowing for rapid implementation.

But how fair is this. You can tell from the tone of the message that the £10K coming to this client is just a nice bonus. But there are quite a number of losers – those who rent small offices where the rent is inclusive of rates, everyone working from home, anyone whose business premises are even only slightly over the £15K cut off, etc.

‘Furloughed’ workers next time.