Dear Birmingham City Council,

In terms of the Freedom of Information Act of 2000, and subject to section 40(2) on personal data, could you please provide me with a complete and up-to-date list of all business (non-residential) property rates data for your local authority, and including the following fields:

- Billing Authority Property Reference Code (linking the property to the VOA database reference)
- Firm's Trading Name (i.e. property occupant)
- Full Property Address (Number, Street, Postal Code, Town)
- Occupied / Vacant
- Date of Occupation / Vacancy
- Actual annual rates charged (in Pounds)

If you are unable to provide an absolute “Occupation / Vacancy” status, please provide the Exemptions and / or Reliefs that a particular property may be receiving.

Please provide these data as machine-readable as either a CSV or Microsoft Excel file, capable of re-use, and under terms of the Open Government Licence (meaning reuse for any and all purposes, including commercial).

I last requested this data three months ago, and this is a request for an updated and current dataset.

I'm sure you get many requests for business rates and responding and managing these FOIs must be costly for you. Could I request that - as 65% of local authorities now do - you update and release this dataset via a dedicated page on your local authority website or on an open data service. I can recommend approaches for you to consider, and you should find that this reduces the time and cost of this request process.

Yours faithfully,

Gavin Chait

Dear Birmingham City Council,

Thank you for providing me your data. Are you able to advise if you are also able to provide me with the occupancy status of each property (occupied/void)? This field is not included.

Please could you update this and provide an updated version of your data.

Yours sincerely,

Gavin Chait

Dear Birmingham City Council,

Thanks for your response. Just to confirm, yes, you have provided two files, one containing the list of all ratepayers, and one containing a list of those receiving exemptions, however, the exemptions list contains no data on exemptions or reliefs.

The headers for the two files are as follows:

ALL (NNDR all propertiesV2 2018.xls):
-------------------------------------------------
Primary Liable party name
Primary Liable Party Contact Add
Full Property Address
Current Rateable Value
Liable Responsibility Start Date
Property Reference Number
NDR - Analysis code description

EXEMPTIONS (NNDR_Exemptions V2 2018.xlsx):
---------------------------------------------------------------
Primary Liable party name
Full Property Address
Post Code
Current Rateable Value
Account Live Status Flag
Property Reference Number
NDR - Analysis code description

There is no column specifying any reliefs/exemptions and so there is no way to produce the reconciliation you describe.

Could you please provide an updated exemptions file include the data requested?

Yours sincerely,

Gavin Chait