Abstract

Under the Business Rates Retention Scheme, local authorities can now pool their business rates income. DCLG has spent the last 9 months introducing pooling and have 13 pools (comprising of 90 local authorities) which will operate from 1 April 2013. DCLG would like help in developing a model to simulate local authorities income levels on an annual basis. The data required to initially construct the model is already available but there are limitations on the types of the information available to simulate future income positions. For example, local authority income could be simulated using historic growth, but we know that there is a large degree of volatility in business rates income so historic growth cannot predict future income. Therefore the model should consider the wide range of volatility and simulate growth scenarios to enable DCLG to undertake a sophisticated degree of scenario planning.