Business Rates, Warehouses and the Removals Industry

What was announced today

The Prime Minister has announced a 20% cut in business rates for pubs, social clubs and live music venues in England from April 2027.

• Nearly 32,000 properties benefit
• A typical pub saves an estimated £1,100 in the next financial year
• The package is worth around £100 million a year
• It sits on top of the 15% relief announced in January for 2026/27, with those bills frozen in real terms for a further two years
• The very largest live music venues are excluded, with detail to follow at the Budget

How it is being funded

Two things. Neither is a warehouse levy.

Reviewing reliefs for businesses the government judges do not make a positive contribution to local communities. Vape shops are named as the example.

Tax compliance for online marketplaces. The government is consulting on making online marketplaces responsible for preventing non-compliant sellers from avoiding their tax obligations.

And one line that deserves more attention than it will get:

That matters. The government has chosen to make online retail contribute through VAT compliance, not through warehouse rating. For an industry that has spent three weeks bracing for a warehouse levy, that is the most important sentence in the document.

What was not announced

There is no increase to warehouse or storage business rates in this announcement. There is no new definition of a fulfilment centre. There is no measure that touches a removals repository.

If you have read that removals and storage firms are about to pay for the pub cut, that is not what the announcement says.

So why were operators worried?

Because the Prime Minister said exactly that, three weeks before taking office.

Speaking on LBC on 2 July, Andy Burnham said there was a case for higher business rates on warehouses and the major developments on the outskirts of our cities, so that business rates could be cut for pubs by 20% and some high street businesses lifted out of business rates altogether.

The pub cut has now arrived. The funding came from somewhere else this time.

That is a good outcome. It is not a settled one. The stated intent is on the public record, and the Budget is still to come.

What we think

Three arguments, and we think they are stronger than the ones currently being made on this industry's behalf.

Argument one: we are the businesses that bring people together

In that same interview, the Prime Minister set out who he wants to protect and why. He named bars, restaurants, coffee shops and hairdressers, and the reason he gave was that they bring social benefit. They bring people together.

We would put it plainly: every one of those customers had to arrive from somewhere.

A removals firm is the mobility layer of a community. We are the reason a family can take a job in another town. We are the reason an elderly couple can downsize near their grandchildren. We are the reason a young family can move into the catchment area they need. We are how people join the communities the government wants to revive.

Whatever the merits of taxing e-commerce, a removals repository is not an e-commerce warehouse. It is community infrastructure, and it happens to sit on an industrial estate because that is where you are permitted to put a building full of other people's furniture.

Argument two: taxing our warehouse is a tax on moving home

This is the part that undoes the policy on its own terms.

A removals business runs at very thin margins. Rates are a fixed cost. Fixed costs do not get absorbed at that margin, they get passed on. There is nowhere else for them to go.

So a rise in warehouse rates does not land on a distribution giant's balance sheet. It lands on the price of moving house, and on the price of storing your belongings between two homes. It is paid by the family completing a purchase, by the couple in a chain, by the person who has sold and not yet bought.

The government's stated aim is to put money back in people's pockets and to give people breathing space. Raising the cost of moving home does the opposite, and it does it at the single most financially stretched moment in most people's lives.

It is also, in effect, a tax on the very mobility that fills the high streets the relief is designed to save.

Argument three: this industry is already delivering the government's own youth agenda

The Prime Minister has been explicit about what he wants for young people. Work placements guaranteed for 16 to 18 year olds. An apprenticeship for every 16 to 18 year old who wants one. An end to an education system overly focused on the university route, with real paths into technical qualifications.

Outside construction, removals is one of the very few industries in this country where the door is genuinely open to anyone, from any background, with no qualifications at all.

You can start as a porter at sixteen with nothing. From there the route runs through licence acquisition, Driver CPC, warehouse and storage operations, surveying and estimating, transport management and the Transport Manager CPC, and into running an operation. Every one of those is a real, portable, technical qualification. Every one is funded and delivered by employers, not by the state.

This industry already does the thing the government says it wants doing. It takes people the education system did not serve and gives them a trade, a licence and a career.

It does that out of margins that are among the thinnest in the economy. Raise the fixed cost base and the first thing that goes is the apprentice, because an apprentice is a cost before they are a contribution.

What we are worried about

That the definitional problem is still unsolved. The Valuation Office Agency classifies property by special category code. There is no code for an e-commerce fulfilment centre. Removals storage sits under general classifications alongside distribution warehouses, cold stores and third-party logistics. Today's announcement sidesteps that problem by using VAT instead. It does not solve it.

That intent survives the mechanism. Using VAT this time does not retire the argument for taxing warehouses. It defers it. The government has confirmed it will return to wider business rates reform at the Budget.

That we get caught by default. If a warehouse measure ever does proceed without a use-based definition, there is currently no instrument in existence that could target a fulfilment centre without also catching a family removals firm's repository. That is not an oversight anyone has fixed. It is precisely why the Online Sales Tax was consulted on in 2022 and then abandoned as too complex to design without unfair outcomes.

That nobody is making our case specifically. The removals and storage argument is different from the big-shed logistics argument and it is stronger. We hold customers' goods rather than stock for sale. Our dwell times are months and years, not hours. Our vehicle movements per square foot are a fraction of a distribution centre's. Folded into a general warehouse campaign, that distinction disappears entirely.

That we are already paying in, unnoticed. Any ratepayer not receiving transitional relief or Supporting Small Business relief is paying a 1p supplement on their multiplier this year to fund the relief given to those who are. That is a transfer from stable businesses to those seeing large increases, and storage operators are on the paying side of it without ever having been asked.

That the cumulative burden is invisible. Business rates do not arrive alone. They arrive alongside employer National Insurance, the National Living Wage, Clean Air Zone and ULEZ charges, Direct Vision Standard compliance, operator licence obligations, driver shortages and vehicle costs. No single measure breaks a business. The stack does.

Where you actually stand today

Since April 2026, England has run five multipliers instead of two.

Two things follow from that, and the first is good news.

The multiplier you pay has come down. Non-RHL multipliers fell from 55.5p and 49.9p last year to 48.0p and 43.2p. Rateable values rose at the revaluation, but the rate applied to them fell by roughly 13%. Some operators will be better off this year, not worse.

And most removals premises are well below the £500,000 threshold, so the high value multiplier does not reach them. It is worth being clear about that, because the alternative is an industry frightening itself about a measure that does not currently apply to it.

The transitional relief detail, properly

The government has put £4.3 billion behind the revaluation over three years. That splits into a £3.2 billion transitional relief scheme and a Supporting Small Business scheme worth over £500 million.

Transitional relief caps how much your bill can rise each year, and the cap depends on your rateable value band:

This is the part worth reading twice. Most removals and storage warehouses sit in the top band, where the cap is 30%, not 15%. The protection is real but it is thinner for a warehouse operator than the headline figures suggest.

Separately, the Supporting Small Business scheme caps increases at £800 or the relevant transitional cap, whichever is higher, for businesses losing small business rate relief, rural rate relief or the 40% retail, hospitality and leisure relief.

The bit nobody mentions

There is also a 1p transitional supplement added to the multiplier for one year from April 2026. It is payable by every ratepayer who is not receiving transitional relief or Supporting Small Business relief.

Read that again. If your bill did not rise enough to qualify for relief, you are paying an extra penny in the pound to fund the relief given to everyone whose bill did.

When this actually gets decided

The Budget. The government has confirmed it will return to wider business rates reform, including Small Business Rates Relief, at that point.

Two things to be clear about.

There is no live consultation on warehouse rating. Nothing to respond to on that question today.

The open consultation on online marketplace VAT liability is about VAT collection, not business rates. Responding to it about your rateable value will achieve nothing. It is the wrong door.

Why now is the moment to write

This is the part most operators get wrong, and it costs them.

A new government, in its first weeks, is the single best window you will ever get. Positions are not yet fixed. Ministers are still deciding what they think. Backbenchers have not yet settled into voting patterns. Civil servants are drafting from a blank page rather than defending an existing line.

The Prime Minister has also said explicitly that he wants MPs empowered to make the state accountable to their communities, that he wants to take power out of Westminster, and that he does not want the whip used to punish MPs who vote by conscience. He has invited exactly this kind of contact.

A template letter to your MP

Copy this, fill in the bracketed sections, and send it. It takes twenty minutes. Send it as an email to your MP's parliamentary address and copy your trade association. Find your MP and their contact details at members.parliament.uk.

How to make it land

• Send it from your business email, not a personal one. It marks you as an employer and a constituent at the same time.
• Fill in every bracket. A letter with real numbers in it gets read. A generic one gets a standard reply.
• Get your rateable value and classification first. Both are public. Search your address on the Valuation Office Agency website. If you do not know which classification your building sits under, you cannot tell whether a future measure would catch you, and neither can your MP.
• Ask for something specific. A written question, a meeting, a visit. "Please consider our position" is not an ask. "Please table this question" is.
• The site visit is the strongest part of the letter. MPs say yes to site visits far more often than people expect, and an hour in a warehouse does more than any amount of correspondence.
• Copy your trade association so the same argument is being made in more than one place at once.

The rooms this needs to reach

Writing to your MP is the first step, not the only one. The same evidence is worth putting in front of the organisations already working on this.

• The All-Party Parliamentary Group for Freight and Logistics. The cross-party group where freight and logistics policy actually gets discussed. Removals and storage is barely represented in it, which is exactly the problem. Details of chairs and secretariat are published on the parliamentary APPG register at publications.parliament.uk.
• The UK Warehousing Association. The most active body lobbying on warehouse business rates, and already making the definitional argument. A concrete example of a low-throughput, long-dwell storage operation caught by the same classification as a high-throughput fulfilment centre is useful evidence to them.
• Logistics UK and the Road Haulage Association. Both carry weight on vehicle and operator costs, and both have Treasury access at Budget time.
• The Self Storage Association UK, if you run self storage alongside containerised storage. The classification argument is nearly identical.
• Your own trade association. The removals and storage case is different from the general warehouse case, and it needs to be made separately or it disappears into a bigger campaign about big sheds.

The four tests worth arguing for

If a warehouse measure ever does proceed, these are the criteria that would separate a repository from a fulfilment centre. They are worth memorising, because they are the whole argument.

• Who owns the goods. In removals and self storage, the customer does. In a fulfilment centre, the occupier does. This alone is a clean legal distinction.
• Dwell time. Storage is measured in months and years. Fulfilment is measured in hours.
• Throughput and vehicle movements per square foot. A repository might see a handful of movements a week. A fulfilment centre sees hundreds a day.
• Employment density and automation. Different operations entirely, and both are measurable.

Any one of these does the job. Rateable value alone does not, which is why a value threshold is the wrong instrument for what is fundamentally a question about use.

Sources

• Prime Minister's Office, 10 Downing Street, HM Treasury and Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade, press release, 23 July 2026
• LBC, Tonight with Andrew Marr, 2 July 2026
• Non-Domestic Rating (Multipliers and Private Schools) Act 2025
• HM Treasury, Budget 2025
• Valuation Office Agency special category code list