Wirral plans business rates incentive

WIRRAL Borough Council is drawing up  plans to attract  blue chip companies to a flagship enterprise zone.

This follows a council report which spells out that Wirral Waters Enterprize Zone has not attracted the big hitting investors originally envisaged when it was launched in 2012.

The council’s cabinet is now being asked to back a bid to borrow money in order to attract the missing investors as part of Wirral Waters Enterprise Zone Investment Plan.

It would offer a business rate discount of up to £275,000 to firms over five years and allow the money saved to be reinvested.

The report says since the zone was created three years ago the basic incentives had not been enough to encourage new development.
 
In addition, property values on completion are far less than the cost of development.

Cllr Davies said: “It’s a problem across the north of England where property values are not sufficiently high for developers to come and do new builds or speculative building.”

He said it was the council’s intention to “attract some of the bigger companies” by making it “financially worth their while to relocate to Wirral Waters”.

The  “mechanism” of borrowing against anticipated business rates income has been “tried elsewhere and found to work”, he said.

“Other Enterprise Zones have done this, where you can use the predicted surplus money from business rates in the future and borrowing against that to generate additional funding which can then be used as financial inducements to encourage companies to come to the Enterprise Zone,” he said.

“I’m very optimistic that the first half of of this financial year we’ll see some big announcements.”