DUP’s Sammy Wilson presses Sinn Fein’s Conor Murphy to pass on £9m extra rates cash to businesses

He was speaking after the chancellor waived business rates for tens of thousands of England’s retail, leisure and hospitality firms for a year, in order to mitigate the impact of coronavirus.

Northern Ireland business leaders immediately called on Stormont to extend the same rates relief here, but Stormont Finance Minister Conor Murphy said the £200m cost would have a significant impact on other services.

Mr Wilson said that Mr Murphy told the Assembly yesterday that over the last three years the Northern Ireland Executive received £80m from money allocated in England to reduce the rates bills for NI small businesses. In Northern Ireland, only £2m of this was used to benefit businesses, Mr Wilson said.

“The result is that of all the countries in the UK, we now give the lowest level of support to small businesses in the form of rates relief,” he added. “In [Wednesday’s] Budget, Northern Ireland received an estimated £9m in additional money for the block grant as a result of the measures taken by the government at Westminster, to help small businesses with their rates and improve their cash flow at this difficult time.”

While the MP accepted it may be “unrealistic” to expect the finance minister to find enough money to deal with the years when all rates relief cash was not passed on to NI businesses, he said there can be “no excuse” not to add this year’s extra £9m allocation to the £20m Stormont spent to reduce business rates last year. This would increase NI business rates relief by almost 50% the DUP MP said.

A Department of Finance spokeswoman did not respond directly to his comments about passing on the additional £9m.

Instead she noted that NI business rates reliefs currently exceed £237m a year, including the unique provision of 70% relief to manufacturing businesses at a cost of £63m.

“Our early assessment is that the additional cost of replicating the new English reliefs would exceed £200m,” she added. “Although exact figures are not yet available, it appears that funding through the Budget will fall far short of that figure.

“Funding such a scheme would therefore mean less money for hard-pressed public services. It is for the Executive to decide how the Budget is allocated to support businesses and public services in this difficult time.”