People often ask me what I think of business rates, it's a bit complicated but here we go.
The business rateable value is what you would expect the rent to be, the valuation is set by the inland revenue, and based on the existing rents of shops nearby. The size and frontage is taken into account.
Business rates are collected by the district council, the money is sent to central government and then shared out among the councils.
Rateable values assume the tenant is responsible for maintaining and insuring the building, back in the day when retail was fairly strong and the interest rate fairly high landlords aimed to get about 10% of the value of the building in rent. Now the proportion would be much lower. This is also complicated because there is a fair amount of shop property let fairly short term with the landlord maintaining the building.
link to check rateable values
If your rateable value is under 15,000 you qualify for full business rates relief, i.e. you don't pay any rates provided it's your only business property. With shops in Ramsgate that is pretty much all apart from the very large ones.
The largest expense by far is wages, 1 worker doing a 40 hour week on minimum wage is about £17,000 so it costs about £20,000 per year with the other expenses of employing someone. so if you had 3 workers on minimum wage and a rent of £10,000 per year that would be £70,000 per year add on heat light phone and insurance and you are going to have to find nearly £2,000 per week just to open the doors.
Work wise here at Michael's Bookshop I have been changing the shop fittings in the craft section, so I can move the architecture into it next to the building and constructions section and expand the art section.
link to the photos of the books we put out today
next the mystery photos
Q1 Where in Thanet and where was it taken from
yesterday's answers
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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.