Finance Minister Conor Murphy has announced details of the 2020-21 NI budget, with rates reductions for all businesses and further measures to fight Covid-19.
The UK Government announced its annual budget earlier this month, and the Northern Ireland Assembly subsequently set to work assigning the specific budget for Northern Ireland. Finance Minister Conor Murphy announced increase budgets for all government departments and a series of measures to support Northern Ireland's businesses in the face of teh Covid-19 outbreak.
The budget confirms a three month rates holiday for all businesses in Northern Ireland, for which £100 million of Covid-19 funding has been set aside. The executive has been assigned a further £812 million to help fight the outbreak, which will be allocated later in a separate process. This budget announcement was a high-level overview, with a more detailed document to be published in May.
The minister also announced a temporary freeze on domestic rates for homes to protect those furloughed workers waiting on HMRC's payments (now expected in June) in addition to a significant commercial rates cut for all businesses following the Reval2020 report. Business rates will now be 18% lower than before the re-evaluation took place.
"While domestic rates are relatively low, business rates are extremely high," said the Minister. "Our SMEs have long cited the high cost of rates as a key difficulty. I have reduced business rates by 12.5%. Combined with Reval 2020 this means an 18% reduction in rates. Although I decided to reduce business rates in advance of the Covid-19 threat, this reduction will help with the economic recovery on the other side of this pandemic."
Other headline items in the budget announcement include an increased budget of £12.2bn assigned across all government departments, with an additional £278.6m assigned to the Department for Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs to replace the EU Common Agriculture payments farmers will no longer get. A total of £1.6 billion has been allocated to a range of projects across all sectors of the economy, with full details due in the May report.
Source: Budget statement
