Rates bills will soon be dropping through householders’ letterboxes. Everyone faces a bigger charge this year, with the Executive putting its regional portion up by 4%, just above the current rate of inflation.
Councils are also hiking their district element. This is less-bad news for Lisburn and Castlereagh residents, who will experience the smallest jump of 3.98%, than it is for their counterparts in Mid and East Antrim, where the council - which can most kindly be described as beleaguered - is imposing a 9.78% rise.
No-one especially enjoys having to pay rates but it is nonetheless an effective way for the authorities at Stormont and council level to raise revenue to provide the services we expect.
- Terminally-ill resident of defective Victoria Square apartment complex calls for Stormont law changeOpens in new window
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- Record £1.5bn in rates paid in north this year, as LPS steps up action against defaultersOpens in new window
That system has been upended in the most perverse way for the owners of the apartments at Victoria Square in Belfast city centre. They have been charged rates since 2019, when they were ordered to leave their homes after structural issues emerged.
At a most basic level they have been paying to have bins emptied at properties that, through no fault of their own, they cannot set foot inside.
It has been another source of stress in what is already a very challenging financial and legal situation.
Fresh attention has been brought to their case after the apartment owners failed in their legal bid to secure compensation.
Finance minister Caoimhe Archibald, who is responsible for Land and Property Services which administers rates, says that their bills will now be paused, as will legal action against apartment owners who have stopped paying rates.
This is a welcome development and offers some much-needed relief to people who have found themselves mired in a complex legal quagmire not of their making. But it is also the very least that the Executive should be doing.
Although the Executive has been mostly part-time in recent years, it was operational at earlier stages of the Victoria Square debacle and did nothing to help the apartment owners
There have been no convincing explanation as to why LPS has been sending rates bills year after year, much less as to why it has pursued legal action.
Although the Executive has been mostly part-time in recent years, it was operational at earlier stages of the Victoria Square debacle and did nothing to help the apartment owners.
The law around structural defects was changed in England and Wales to extend the time limit for claims from six years to 30 years. That happened two years ago, during the DUP boycott; that party’s bungalow-brained protest about the Irish Sea trade border has meant that another border has been erected for homeowners in Northern Ireland.
The Executive needs to do more - and do it quickly - to support the Victoria Square apartment owners. That would be a better way of using rates revenue than some of the other schemes dreamed up at Stormont.
