“The Welsh Government is committed to reducing the opportunities for avoidance within the non-domestic rates system” is what it says on the webpage for Wales’s ongoing consultation, closing on the 12th August 2025, on tackling empty rates avoidance, an issue which is costing local councils millions.
Indeed, this consultation proves Wales is cracking down, introducing new legislation which will make schemes such as snail farms and box shifting significantly less viable options for property owners seeking to avoid paying tax. Instead, property owners should look to ethical alternatives if they wish to avoid paying empty rates.
The consultation is discussing two main proposals which have the potential to introduce some crucial legislature. The first seeks to define schemes which are being used to avoid tax as artificial, allowing them to be targeted the ‘anti-avoidance framework’. This framework, established in the previous 2018 consultation, requires the billing authority to counteract any benefits the property owners would be receiving from their scheme through financial penalties.
Essentially, this would make the owners attempts futile, removing any potential benefits. The second proposal would create a duty for rate payers to report specific changes of circumstances to billing authorities, leading closer to monitoring of non-domestic properties. The consultation explains:
“Billing authorities are not always notified about changes of ratepayer or occupation status for a property, preventing them for correctly calculating and attributing liability. A common example occurs when an occupier eligible for Small Business Rates Relief vacates a property, but the owner of the empty property fails to notify the billing authority that it is no longer occupied.”
As tax avoidance is not technically illegal, the only real way to approach the issue are methods like those being proposed by the Welsh consultation – and it is indeed a very important issue to tackle. According to a 2019 survey by the Local Government Association (LGA), councils in England lost an estimated £250 million annually due to avoidance practices, equivalent to the cost of building 2,000 council homes, 150,000 hospital beds, or 12 secondary schools. One local council claimed to have lost £35m annually due to box shifting alone.
This begs the question, why aren’t England taking the same measures as Wales? Birmingham City Council declared bankruptcy in September of 2023 due to mounting financial challenges which was directly attributed to rates loss, with several further councils expected to fail soon. Avoidance is only causing us loss and effects everyone in society regarding the financial perspective, leading to increased council tax rates for the average payee, but also from a social perspective. Empty non-domestic buildings hinder highstreets and town centres; not only are they often an eyesore but also take up space that could be occupied by thriving local businesses. Rates thus serve as a necessary deterrence against letting buildings sit abandoned and drives an impetus to keep them occupied.
Some organisations, however, seek to tackle these social effects whilst still permitting property owners some benefit, by avoiding rates ethically. This mutually beneficial approach, accepted by dozens of councils’ business rates teams can be achieved in numerous ways, most commonly by linking charitable organisations with temporarily empty spaces. At ASTOP, we only work in transforming unused spaces for good causes and helping business mitigate business rates ethically.
We have helped repurpose over 750 vacant sites, that would otherwise have remained empty and unused – benefitting both landlords and communities through a symbiotic commercial combination of business rates relief and charitable activities.
In a survey including commercial landlords, asset managers, charities and good causes, temporary commercial occupiers, local authorities and public officers, carried by Ban Box Shifting during the March 2025 UK consultation, all surveyed groups supported partnering with charities as an ethical solution to repurpose vacant properties whilst allowing property owners to benefit from charitable rates relief, thereby addressing property underutilisation, financial concerns, and community needs.
Ethical alternatives such as this compound the effects of government legislation as they open pathways for companies wishing to avoid paying empty rates by, very straightforwardly, making them no longer empty, as they are instead filled which charitable organisations. This ethically incentivises the landlord and both brightens up our streets by filling un-occupied buildings (thus preventing them from becoming run down) and gives back to local communities through their function as charities.
However, it really is the impetus of legislative demand that will push property owners into taking the ethical route, and that is why England drastically needs to catch up with Wales. The hard part is already done; Wales has come up with effective proposals for tackling such ludicrous schemes as snail farms and box shifting and all England needs to do now is meet them at this level (or go further as Scotland has already done).
The Ban Box Shifting survey illustrates remarkably clearly that this is something people ubiquitously want, finding that 97% of respondents were against box shifting, 92% were against snail farms and 92% again were against fake ‘prayer rooms’ used to claim 100% relief as a place of public worship.
Overall, we cannot keep allowing snails and empty boxes to drain our public funds. Wales has made its stance clear—pay up or take the ethical path. England must follow suit and send the same unmistakable message: accountability over loopholes, integrity over exploitation.
