FOI/EIR 25/26-417-Business Rates Relief

Full list of business rates with relief exemption applied

Request received 25 November 2025

I am requesting a dataset of all non-domestic hereditaments for which you are the Billing Authority, containing the following fields for each property:

  1. Liable party name
    • Please provide the full liable party name for companies, LLPs, charities, partnerships, and other non-natural persons.

    • Where the ratepayer is an individual/sole trader, please redact the proprietor’s

      name and replace it with a neutral placeholder such as:

      “REDACTED – sole trader”.

  2. Relief indicators (YES/NO for each):
    • Retail, Hospitality & Leisure Relief
    • Small Business Rates Relief
    • Supporting Small Business Rates Relief
  3. VOA-formatted address as held in your billing records (including UARN/RRN if held).
  4. Annual charge / annual liability for the current financial year (net of reliefs).

Responded 26 November 2025

This information is exempt from disclosure under Section 41(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. In respect of those requests that are answered in full, partially or the total refused, please take this as notice under FOIA, that we:

  1. Consider the information as exempt from disclosure under the Act.
  2. Claim exempt under sections of the Act:

Section 41(1) Information Provided in Confidence

  1. State why the exemption applies:

41(1) Information is exempt information if — (a) it was obtained by the public authority from any other person (including another public authority), and, (b) the disclosure of the information to the public (otherwise than under this Act) by the public authority holding it would constitute a breach of confidence actionable by that or any other person.

East Cambridgeshire District Council confirms that we hold the information requested, but we have recently taken guidance from the ICO, and we longer provide Business Rates information, as this information has been provided in confidence.

Section 41(1)(a) of the FOI Act provides that information is exempt if it was obtained by the public authority from any other person (or company, local authority or any other legal entity) and disclosure of the information to the public by the public authority holding it, would constitute a breach of confidence. The information was provided to the Council from the Valuation Office and from the ratepayer themselves, and we consider that this information is provided in confidence. This applies to the account/company name of the liable party and the billing address, the account start/end date, details of if the property is currently subject to rate reliefs, the date from which any reliefs have been applied and their values including if the property has an occupied/empty status.

Section 41(1)(a) requires that the information in question was obtained from any other person. The information in question has been obtained by us from owners, ratepayers, and third-party companies/agents, therefore we consider this part of the exemption satisfied.

Section 41(1)(b) requires the disclosure by us to constitute an actionable breach of confidence. The information must have the necessary quality of confidence, and in our opinion it does. It is recognised in English law that an important duty of confidentiality is owed to tax and rate payers. This is what is known as “taxpayer confidentiality”. This is a long-established principle of common law, protecting taxpayers' affairs against disclosure to the public. We are satisfied that the requested information is not trivial, nor is it available by any other means and if we were to disclose the requested information ratepayers/their representatives could issue legal proceedings against us.

Section 41 of the Freedom of Information Act confers an absolute exemption on disclosure and there is no public interest test to apply.

Review Requested 26 November 2025

I wish to request an internal review of the Council’s refusal of my FOI request. Section 41 has

been applied incorrectly for the reasons set out below.

  1. The refusal relies on Section 41, but the information I requested is not confidential information Section 41 applies only to information:

    1. obtained from another person, and
    2. whose disclosure would amount to an actionable breach of confidence.
      • liable party name for non-natural persons with individuals replaced by “REDACTED – sole

    The information I requested does not meet this test. My request was strictly limited to:

trader”

  • Yes/No indicators for Retail, Hospitality and Leisure Relief, Small Business Rates Relief and Supporting Small Business Rates Relief
    • VOA-formatted or billing-system address
      • annual charge or annual liability

None of this is confidential information. These are billing facts created by the Council in the performance of statutory duties, not information provided in confidence by the ratepayer.

  1. Business rates billing data is created by the Council, not provided under a duty of confidence Billing data, relief status, annual charges and the identity of the liable party for companies, LLPs and charities are all produced by the Council as part of its statutory role as Billing Authority. They are not provided in confidence by the taxpayer. The Council’s role is to assess, calculate, apply reliefs and issue bills. These facts are the Council’s own administrative outputs, not third-party confidential information.

    Section 41 cannot apply to information that originates from the authority itself.

  2. “Taxpayer confidentiality” does not apply to non-personal business rates information The duty of taxpayer confidentiality applies to personal tax affairs, not to the business rates

    liabilities of companies, LLPs, charities or partnerships. I expressly excluded personal data by requiring that individuals be redacted and replaced with “REDACTED – sole trader”. Once individuals are removed, the dataset contains only non-personal information.

    Non-personal ratepayer names and business rates relief data for corporate entities are not confidential and are disclosed routinely by many billing authorities.

  3. The Council has not shown how disclosure would constitute an actionable breach of confidence

    To engage Section 41, disclosure must be clearly capable of legal action. For an actionable breach to arise:

  • the information must have been communicated in circumstances importing an obligation of confidence, and
  • the disclosure must cause detriment to the confider.

Neither test is met. Rate reliefs, annual liability and the names of corporate ratepayers do not carry any confidentiality obligations. The Council has not demonstrated that companies or charities provide this information to the authority in confidence, nor has it identified any detriment. Therefore Section 41 cannot be applied.

5. The ICO has not issued any blanket guidance preventing the disclosure of non-domestic rating data.  Your response states that the Council has “taken guidance from the ICO” and “no longer provides Business Rates information”. However, there is no ICO decision or guidance prohibiting the disclosure of non-domestic rating data.  In fact, the ICO has issued multiple decision notices requiring disclosure of:

  • ratepayer names for companies and organisations
  • relief information
  • billing address information
  • rate liability information

Therefore the Council’s interpretation of ICO “guidance” is incorrect.

6. Clarified request under Section 16 For clarity, the request is limited only to:

  • liable party name with individuals replaced by “REDACTED – sole trader”
  • Retail, Hospitality and Leisure Relief (Yes/No)
  • Small Business Rates Relief (Yes/No)
  • Supporting Small Business Rates Relief (Yes/No)
  • annual charge or annual liability
  • VOA-formatted or billing-system property address

No personal data, correspondence addresses, occupancy data, credit balances, empty property relief or start/end dates are required. None of these items are confidential.

7. Conclusion

Because the requested information is not confidential, does not originate from a third party in confidence and does not amount to information whose disclosure could give rise to an actionable breach of confidence, Section 41 has been applied in error.

I request that the internal review overturns the refusal and directs disclosure of the requested information. I look forward to your internal review response within 20 working days.

Review Responded 24 December 2025

Section 41(1) of the FOI Act 2000 states:

Information is exempt information if –

  1. It was obtained by the public authority from any other person (including another public authority), and
  2. The disclosure of the information to the public (otherwise that under this Act) by the public authority holding it would constitute a breach of confidence actionable by that or any other person.

The Council receives all of its business rates information from two external sources:

  • the Valuation Office Agency (VOA), for information relating to the property and its value. The VOA is responsible for providing specific property information necessary for billing as set out in the Local Government Finance Act 1988 and provides weekly updates of any amendments to the property rating list, and;
  • the ratepayers, to advise on the name of the business, the dates it took occupation of the

premises, any circumstances that might entitle the business to financial relief and anything else that contributes to the effective creation and management of billing.

The Council is aware that in some circumstances the ratepayer may appoint an agent to provide information on the ratepayer’s behalf and / or the property landlord may provide some limited information, such as confirmation of tenant names and lease dates. These are also third parties (Review Q2)

The Council considers the First tier (Information Rights) Tribunal decision on appeal EA/2018/00551 (Review Q5) which considered whether information provided to authorities in respect of non-domestic rates could be confidential for the purposes of section 41 of the FOIA. It was concluded in that appeal, that information provided to public authorities for the purposes of calculating rates or reliefs is information which the general public would expect to be information provided in confidence.

The Tribunal also considered that the information has the necessary quality of confidence. It is considered that releasing the information could be utilised by third parties for those third parties’ purposes, including unsolicited purposes and would result in a loss of control to rate payers over the information they have provided to the Council. There could also be a risk of damage to the businesses concerned. It is therefore concluded that there could be an actionable breach of confidence (Review Q1, Q4 & Q6)

Section 41 (1) of the FOIA is an absolute exemption which is not subject to a public interest test. However, it is necessary to consider if there is an overriding public interest in disclosure of the confidential information: Releasing information would demonstrate to the public at large that the Council has identified appropriate ratepayers for each property, has charged each ratepayer correctly, and has taken action to collect unpaid liabilities and administer the non-domestic rates account properly. Releasing information may benefit some individuals, groups or organisations who have a personal or commercial interest as it may enable them to focus marketing or commercial products to businesses. Some information may already be in the public domain if released by the businesses themselves, e.g. via websites or other promotional tools. However, businesses can retain control of their own information and its dissemination if promoting themselves: disclosure would remove this control from the hands of the business itself.

In the appeal EA/2018/00551 it was concluded that: “there is only a limited public interest in disclosure of this information, and consequently we conclude that there is insufficient public interest in disclosure to outweigh the importance of the general common law principle of taxpayer confidentiality.” There should be significant public interest factors present in order to override the strong public interest in maintaining confidentiality. The Council, therefore, considers that the public interest in the disclosure of the information is weak as compared to the public interest in protecting the principle of tax-payer confidentiality (Review Q3).

In coming to this decision, the Council has also considered the Information Commissioner’s Office’s decisions IC-265932-F0Y0, IC-264793-Q3L7 and ic-316240-r3n1.pdf and we have concluded to uphold our decision to refuse your request (Review Q7).