Bermondsey Place,
Malt Street

Montagu Evans was instructed by Berkeley Homes to investigate and appeal against legacy non-domestic rating assessments at the client’s Malt Street development site. The project comprised a large-scale residential development in south-east London, which will see the construction of 1,300 new homes across 12 buildings, which are to be built on a site extending to 4.12 acres.

CHALLENGE

The site had previously been home to a collection of legacy and vacant buildings put to various industrial uses, which were now the client’s liability due to their ownership of the site. This was giving rise to an empty rate liability that needed to be managed and, ultimately, extinguished.

SOLUTION

Having considered what was required for the site, Montagu Evans were instructed to provide the following advice:

• Providing cash flow budgeting and forecasting advice for the current liabilities
• Rate liability verification and management services, including communication with the Billing Authority on the client’s behalf
• Appeal and other mitigation activity dealing in particular with the legacy liability
• Providing consultancy, valuation and liability advice relating to temporary uses during the construction period (e.g. site offices)
• Providing consultancy, valuation and liability advice and pre-influencing the initial assessment of non-domestic occupations (e.g. sales and marketing suite).

OUTCOME

Having reviewed the demands received from Southwark Council and identified the correct assessments, we advised that we would be able to delete the historic assessments from the rating list while works to clear the site were ongoing. We successfully deleted two assessments that had an aggregate RV of £344,000 and an annual liability of £183,008, thereby fully extinguishing the liability from the date the clearance works began.

We also provided Rateable Value estimates for the potential new assessments for the marketing suite and site offices; however, given that the project was paused in May 2022 due to Covid-19 amongst other factors, these were never assessed.

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