Complete Non-Residential / Business Property Rates Data
Gavin Chait made this Freedom of Information request to City of London Corporation as part of a batch sent to 26 authorities This request has been closed to new correspondence. Contact us if you think it should be reopened.
Dear Common Council of the City of London,
In terms of the Freedom of Information Act of 2000, 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 Code
- 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)
While such data series are often published by local authorities, I have undertaken a thorough search of your website and have not found these. If they are available, as requested, then please - in terms of Section 21 of the act - could you provide a link to the page where the data are published, as well as guidance on the update frequency.
I appreciate that properties owned / rented by individuals are personal information and such personal data (i.e. the Firm's Trading Name) would be excluded from my request in terms of Section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. In such cases, please provide the remaining information with the Firm's Trading Name either blank or listed as 'individual'.
Please provide this as machine-readable as either a CSV or Microsoft Excel file, capable of re-use, and under terms of the Open Government Licence.
I am compiling a comprehensive time-series database of business activity across the UK and will require the dataset updated on a quarterly basis. Some 20% of local authorities already provide this dataset (and a total of 30% of local authorities provide a subset of these data) on a monthly to quarterly basis on a dedicated page on their websites or on an open data service. I would appreciate it if you could do the same.
Yours faithfully,
Gavin Chait
Dear Mr Chait,
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT 2000 (FOIA) – REQUEST FOR INFORMATION
The City of London (CoL) acknowledges receipt of your request for information of 14 March 2016.
Public authorities are required to respond to requests within the statutory timescale of 20 working days beginning from the first working day after they receive a request. The Act does not always require public authorities to disclose the information which they hold.
The FOIA applies to the CoL as a local authority, police authority and port health authority. The CoL is the local and police authority for the “Square Mile”, ie the historic City of London, and not for London as a whole. Please see the following link to a map on the CoL's website, which shows the area covered:
www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/maps/Pages/explo...<http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/maps/Page...>.
The CoL does have some functions, including Port Health Authority functions, which extend beyond the City boundary. For further information please see: www.cityoflondon.gov.uk<http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk>.
Yours sincerely,
Information Officer
Town Clerk’s Department
City of London
Tel: 020-7332 1209
www.cityoflondon.gov.uk<http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk>
Dear Mr Chait,
I write further to your request for information on 14^th March 2016 and
the City’s reply of the same date.
In your request you asked for the following information: “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 Code
- 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”
This response acts as a Refusal Notice in pursuance of the Freedom of
Information Act.
We refuse part of the request under Section 21 of the Act in that part of
the information is accessible by other means. The full property addresses
of all properties including the billing authority code (BA reference) and
rateable value are public information and are available on the Valuation
Office Agency (VOA) website. You may need to search in “agent mode”.
Below is a link to the VOA website in agent mode:
[1]http://www.2010.voa.gov.uk/rli/en/advanc...
You may search for all properties within a billing authority area or
select by value, address, description, etc. By multiplying the rateable
value, where this is up to £24,499, by the City’s small non-domestic
rating multiplier of 0.489 (48.9p in the £, including the City premium of
0.5p) and where the value is £25,500 or more, by the City’s non-domestic
rating multiplier of 0.502 (50.2p in the £, including the City premium of
0.5p) the rates payable for the current financial year may be calculated.
There is an exemption under Section 31(1)(a) of the Freedom of Information
Act (FOIA) which we consider applies to the remainder of your request,
i.e. distinguishing whether property is occupied or vacant and giving the
date the property was occupied or vacated.
We consider that the disclosure of information about whether or not
properties are empty puts those properties at risk from crime, as an empty
property is more likely to be the target of, and vulnerable to, crime than
is an occupied property. Hence we consider that disclosure presents a
likely prejudice to the prevention and detection of crime.
The exemption is subject to the public interest test. With regard to
identifying empty properties, it could be considered to be in the public
interest to disclose such information in order to assist, for example, in
encouraging the use of empty properties. The exemption was considered in
the case of Mr. Yiannis Voyias v the Information Commissioner and Camden
EA/2011/0007). The First Tier Tribunal upheld non-disclosure in relation
to empty properties owned by individuals, but instructed the London
Borough of Camden to provide copies of lists both of properties managed by
the Council and of private properties where a non individual “is listed as
being either the owner or as having a material interest in the property”.
This decision was appealed to the Upper Tribunal (case no. GIA/2986/2011)
and in a decision on 6^th June 2012, the Tribunal set aside the original
decision of the First Tier Tribunal and remitted the case to the First
Tier Tribunal for rehearing by a differently constituted panel. The First
Tier Tribunal re-heard the case and in a unanimous decision dated 22^nd
January 2013, dismissed the appeal, i.e Camden need not disclose the
information. Paragraph 55 of the decision states “The relatively small
weight that the public interest in disclosure bears does not, in our view,
come close to equalling the public interest in preventing the categories
of crime we have identified in this decision. Accordingly the public
interest in maintaining the exemption outweighs the public interest in
disclosure. The Council was therefore entitled to refuse to disclose the
information requested by the Appellant.”
In accordance with the above decision, we have to err on the side of
caution and therefore we apply the Section 31 exemption.
Finally, I should mention that a public authority is compelled under the
FOIA to consider any disclosure made under the Act as a disclosure to the
world. The Information Tribunal has stated that “Disclosure under [the]
FOIA is effectively an unlimited disclosure to the public as a whole,
without conditions” (Information Tribunal Appeal Decision EA/2006/0011 &
0013 of 8 Jan 2007). This has also been referred to by the Information
Commissioner (eg Information Commissioner's Decision Notice FS 50294078 of
28 April 2010). Therefore I would have to consider any disclosure to you
as being a disclosure to the public as a whole.
If you wish to make a complaint about the way the CoL has managed your
enquiry under the FOIA, please make your complaint in writing to email
address: [2][email address]. For a link to the CoL’s FOI
complaints procedure, please visit the following page:
[3]www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/Feedback, at the end of which is located the
FOI complaints procedure. If, having used the CoL’s FOI Complaints
Procedure, you are still dissatisfied, you may request the Information
Commissioner to investigate. Please contact: Information Commissioner,
Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF. Tel: (01625)
545700. Website: [4]http://www.ico.org.uk/
The FOIA applies to the City of London as a local authority, police
authority and port health authority.
The City of London holds the copyright in this email. The supply of it
does not give a right to re-use it in a way that would infringe that
copyright, for example, by making copies, publishing and issuing copies to
the public or to any other person. Brief extracts of any of the material
may be reproduced under the fair dealing provisions of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988 (sections 29 and 30) for the purposes of
research for non-commercial purposes, private study, criticism, review and
news reporting, subject to an acknowledgement of the copyright owner.
Yours sincerely,
Head of Revenues,
Chamberlain’s Department,
City of London,
P.O. Box 270, Guildhall, London, EC2P 2EJ
Tel: 020 7332 1387
Website: [5]www.cityoflondon.gov.uk
References
Visible links
1. http://www.2010.voa.gov.uk/rli/en/advanc...
2. mailto:[email address]
3. file:///tmp/www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/Feedback
4. http://www.ico.org.uk/
5. file:///tmp/www.cityoflondon.gov.uk
Dear Common Council of the City of London,
Please pass this on to the person who conducts Freedom of Information reviews.
I am writing to request an internal review of Common Council of the City of London's handling of my FOI request 'Complete Non-Residential / Business Property Rates Data'.
On 14 March 2016, I sent an FOI request for a complete and up-to-date list of all business (non-residential) property rates data, and including the following fields:
- Billing Authority Code
- 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)
My request has been refused in terms of Section 21 and Section 31(1)(a).
According to the Information Commissioners Office, "Section 21 applies to information that is already reasonably accessible to the applicant. It recognises that the right of access under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 is supplementary to the very many ways in which public authorities already provide information to members of the public."
Further, "Section 31 is a prejudice based exemption and is subject to the public interest test. This means that not only does the information have to prejudice one of the purposes listed, but, before the information can be withheld, the public interest in preventing that prejudice must outweigh the public interest in disclosure."
Section 31(1)(a) deals specifically with "the prevention or detection of crime".
It is true that the Valuations Office Agency (VOA) does provide a complete listing of properties detailing:
- Billing Authority Code
- Full Property Address (Number, Street, Postal Code, Town)
We already have these data and wish to cross-reference data which your authority has, and which is not available via the VOA. Without the unique Billing Authority Code for each property we cannot do that. Rejecting providing that data on the grounds that it is available elsewhere is spurious.
The data which you have, and which the VOA do not (along with the Billing Authority Code needed for cross-reference purposes) are:
- Billing Authority Code
- Occupied / Vacant
- Date of Occupation / Vacancy
- Actual annual rates charged (in Pounds)
These are the data you have refused to provide in terms of Section 31(1)(a).
A property being empty may well lead to it being more likely to suffer potential criminal activity, but it does not automatically follow that publishing a list of empty properties in any way changes that potential.
Empty premises will be known to residents of the community in which they are based, or they are advertised as part of a lettings offer. In other words, these are properties of which many people will be clearly aware are empty whether the local authority data are publicly available or not.
In addition, I have run - in parallel with this request - a series of FOI requests to a sample of local authorities and to all police services across England and Wales requesting total number of incidents of criminal activity in empty commercial properties. Such data would permit easy comparison between areas that regularly disclose and those which choose not to in order to assess whether there is a greater risk as a result of disclosure.
To date, no local authorities or police services have produced such data and it appears that no such data are collected. The only data (very sparsely collected) by local authorities about incidents of crime in council-owned commercial premises indicates that no such crime is recorded, even in local authorities where details of empty properties are regularly published.
It is very difficult to substantiate a Section 31 refusal if you have no data to validate your concern. Of the 350 local authorities in England and Wales, more than 56% of these either already make empty property data available, or have done so in response to FOI requests from ourselves.
In other words, there is no substantive basis for concern that publishing a list of empty properties will lead to prejudice under Section 31.
In terms of Public Interest, the purpose of our use of the data requested is in informing entrepreneurs and business seekers about opportunities in empty premises when they are advertised for new tenants. We combine local authority premises occupation data with other data (from the Valuations Office and ONS) to develop forward guidance on business potential in each empty business property. Further details on our activities are available at http://pikhaya.com, but our activity is supported by the Open Data Institute and we have received funding from the EU Open Data Incubator to develop this service.
Our combined data are made available via online commercial property leasing intermediaries as a free service to business seekers. These leasing intermediaries combine our data with properties being offered for rent.
We are mindful, though, that not all authorities wish to release direct information on empty premises. In that case, could we suggest that you provide only a list of occupied properties which we would then reconcile against the master list of properties from the Valuations Office Agency (VOA). VOA data are available via their website, and the complete database by subscription. Empty premises will be known to residents of the community in which they are based. That means that anyone not resident in your community and wanting to find the list of empty properties would have to undertake the costs and technicalities of a similar data reconciliation.
I would ask that you consider that the public interest in economic development and improving opportunities for independent businesses and entrepreneurs far outweighs any concern that the release of data which can identify empty business properties may cause crime.
Unemployment and economic deprivation are often key to reducing the potential for crime. Our intention is to support local economic development initiatives through the use of these data.
I ask that you reconsider your decision and make this data available to us under terms which permit our use thereof.
A full history of my FOI request and all correspondence is available on the Internet at this address: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/c...
Yours faithfully,
Gavin Chait
Dear Mr Chait,
The City of London (CoL) acknowledges receipt of your complaint email (internal review request) of 11 April 2016, as attached;
In accordance with guidance published by the Information Commissioner’s Office, the CoL aims to respond to FOI complaints within 20 working days beginning from the first working day following receipt of the complaint.
Yours sincerely,
Information Officer
Town Clerk’s Department
City of London
Tel: 020-7332 1209
www.cityoflondon.gov.uk<http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk>
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Gavin Chait left an annotation ()
Note, City of London has recently changed their view on non-publication. From April 2019, and every six months thereafter, they will publish their complete commercial ratepayer data to their authority rates website. Please look out for it there.