The pub and hotel business rates review has arrived with a serious purpose, a polished clipboard and the expression of someone who has finally found the correct spreadsheet. On 24 August 2026, the Treasury announced an independent review of how officials value pubs and hotels for business rates. The blank paper roll nodded carefully, then asked whether the valuation method included crisps.
Pub and hotel business rates review in plain terms
Business rates expert Jerry Schurder will lead the review. He will report to the Treasury by the end of March 2027. The review will consider valuations ahead of the next revaluation in 2029. The Treasury says the process will not change the current 2026 valuations. That will reassure anyone who has just finished explaining them to a landlord.
The Treasury has also opened a call for evidence. Landlords, brewers, hoteliers and business owners can submit their views by 16 October 2026. The system now invites the hospitality industry to describe its experience of being assessed. Presumably, it will assess how convincingly everyone describes that experience.
When the numbers need a room
The Treasury says the review should make valuations fairer, more transparent and more reflective of how pubs and hotels operate. That is a modest ambition, but an important one. A business rates formula that understands modern hospitality would improve on one that appears to have spent three decades beside a fax machine, waiting for the market to stop changing.
The announcement also points to a 20% reduction in business rates bills for pubs, social clubs and live music venues from April 2027. That measure sits alongside the review. The review concerns the method used to value properties, rather than an instant rewrite of every bill. The blank paper roll has highlighted this distinction in three colours. It now refuses to discuss it without a flowchart.
The long wait for a sensible measure
The pub and hotel business rates review cannot make every financial problem disappear. It can examine whether the valuation system reflects trading realities, customer habits and the different ways these businesses operate. That is the useful point beneath the official language about certainty, growth and removing barriers.
The review will gather evidence and produce recommendations for the next revaluation. The industry now has a formal route to explain that a pub is not simply a building containing a bar. A hotel is not merely a bedroom with an ambitious corridor.
The blank paper roll has submitted its evidence. It says the till should be valued according to what it contains, not what a distant calculator imagines it might contain. It has requested payment in coins small enough to make the review last until 2029. By then, the calculator may finally be ready to meet the businesses it has been measuring.
Source: GOV.UK.
