Bristol City Council: Discretionary Rates Relief Impact Assessment

At Bristol City Council we have been supporting a large number of artists and arts organisations by granting discretionary business rates relief on many of the spaces you use for making, performing, exhibiting and collaborating. Business Rates are charged on all commercial properties and used to pay for services provided by Bristol City Council. We have the option to apply discretionary business rates relief to a commercial property if it is occupied by an organisation with charitable or not for profit aims. This means Bristol City Council pays the business rates rather than the occupier of the building.

We are in the process of rewriting our Discretionary Business Rates policy. We would like to understand how the current policy has benefited Bristol to help us make the best decisions about how to allocate discretionary business rates relief in the future. To do this we have obtained some funding from Arts Council to conduct an impact assessment to understand the social, economic and cultural affects of our Discretionary Business Rates Relief Policy.

The first stage of this impact assessment is a survey to help understand more about organisations benefiting from discretionary rates relief. Some of you may have completed this survey back in spring 2012. If you completed the survey last time THANK YOU. There are now some additional questions we would be grateful if you could complete. There are guidelines available to download below which give details about which questions are new.

If you weren't able to complete the survey last time please try to complete it now, we need as much information as possible to be able to make the best decisions about discretionary rates relief in the future. The survey is now available to complete online through the following link www.surveymonkey.com/s/dbrr. Please complete survey before the 7th June. If you have questions when you're completing the survey you can contact tana.holmes@bristol.gov.uk .

If you aren't sure if you use a building which gets discretionary business rates relief please download the list below which gives details of all the buildings in current receipt of discretionary business rates relief.

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