Business Grants Update 9/4/20

Today’s business rates support grant update.

By the close of business today a total of 904 grants have paid out (164 up from yesterday)

A total of £10,570,000 (up £1,775,000) has paid out to date

1640 webforms (up 140 from yesterday) had been completed by the end of today.

Telephone contact has been attempted with approx. 80% of the businesses so far – we are still focussing on other forms of contact where telephone contact has proved to be complicated.

Work will continue over the bank holiday period – this will focus on the of the completed web forms as no further payments can be made until next Tuesday due to the bank holidays

Following on from a conference call with officers, councils across Derbyshire and officials from BEIS (Gov department). There are a number of issues that are arising during the process (these are common with other authorities) including:

· Difficulties contacting businesses

· Rejection of small numbers of claims due to errors in details submitted on the web forms

· The emergence of new occupiers in premises – who, due to the lack of need to pay business rates due to business rates reliefs, have failed to notify us of their occupation!

These issues will be worked through case by case, but the focus at the moment is getting valid claims paid.

If you are aware of a business that may be eligible and they haven’t yet supplied any details, please urge them to complete the webform at http://antmck.uk/tf