… business rates.

A blog post inspired by the recent Budget announcement that public toilets will no longer pay business rates, official (vague) details of which can be found Business Rates briefing paper – House of Commons library…

From a previous Factsheet from Jan 2017, it seems local authorities could already choose to exempt a privately-owned ‘public convenience’ from business rates, but not a publicly-owned public convenience – meaning their own, or ones devolved to parish/community/town councils.

That’s quite useful, as more and more borough councils are asking these smaller councils to take on the public toilets or see them close. Then asking them to pay business rates on these toilets (£3000 on average, see later on) is a hefty cost to bear.

This reminded me to try to update my records of ‘how many public toilets have closed’ based on VOA data, because this is the only official data source of ‘# of public toilets’ that exists, and can be tracked back to 2000.

So in 2016 I found a 28% reduction in public toilets since 2000, in England & Wales. 

That’s now: 32% of public toilets in England & Wales have closed since 2000, as of March 2018.

To recap:

In 2000 there were 6087 toilets (source: Hansard)

By 2016 there were 4383 toilets (source: VOA search results for ‘public conveniences’, with results that returned rateable value: ‘deleted’ removed).

So using their new search site – which the response to my FOI request signposted me to – I did an advanced search of Special Category Code – 224: Public Conveniences (National Scheme). I didn’t copy/paste these into Excel as the website showed 173 pages of results, a fact unhelpfully omitted 2 years ago when I did copy/paste the 2016 data. That was fun.

But in these 173 pages were 4316 results. Some of these (maybe 1 or 2 per page of 25 results) are listed as ‘deleted’ or occasionally ‘disused’ or ‘under reconstruction’. Unfortunately as I’m unable to download the results without API knowledge, I can’t easily edit these out.

So instead, I looked at the downloadable-in-Excel dataset called ‘Non-domesting rating: stock of properties 2018’. This gives headline figures for ‘Cat-Code 224 Public Conveniences’ as follows:

224-Public Conveniences (National Scheme) – England & Wales (31st March 2018)

• Rateable properties (count): 4150 
• Rateable value: £13 534 000
• Average rateable value: £3000

As this count of 4150 public conveniences is significantly lower than the 4316 toilets returned in today’s search results, and both are from 2018, this must be the same data with the ‘deleted’ results removed – and at least broadly consistent with data returned in 2000 and subsequent years, in that I also only had headline data and not the full results to interrogate.

Number of Public toilets in England & Wales, from Valuation Office Agency data, updated for 2018: The downwards trend continues.

 

So that’s how I’ve arrived at the statement that 32% of public toilets in England & Wales have closed since 2000 (as of March 2018), and 5% have closed in the last 2 years (March 2016 – March 2018).

I *think* that’s an annual decrease of 2.1%,

or

128 public toilets closing every year.