Free The Night’s Response to NI Rates Increase
Over the last week we’ve seen the impact of Reval 2026 start to land on the hospitality sector in Northern Ireland. Land & Property Services has published draft new rateable values for every non-domestic property in NI. Overall values are up around 15% since the last revaluation, but for many pubs, venues and hotels the jump is far higher, with some facing increases of 200–300% in their draft rates bills.
At the same time, the UK Government has announced that in England all pubs and “live music venues” will get 15% business rates relief in 2026–27, plus a real-terms freeze for the following two years, on top of existing support. Northern Ireland’s rating system is devolved and as things stand, no equivalent targeted support has been announced here.
We’re a small charity, and we’re already at capacity with our work on licensing reform, the Competitions and Marketing Authority complaint and a potential judicial review. We can’t front a full campaign on business rates right now, but we do want to be clear about what we think is fair, and what needs to change if we want nightlife to survive in NI.
Our lane: culture, community, dancefloors
Free The Night isn’t a trade body for “hospitality” as a whole. We’re a charity that supports:
Grassroots music venues
Community-driven spaces with dancefloors
The small operators, promoters and local producers who keep those spaces alive
To a wider extent, other independent operators contributing to night time culture
We recognise that the business rates system is a mess for a lot of small businesses, and that needs fixing. But we’re not going to campaign for blanket tax cuts for huge chains or multinational brands. Some of the biggest companies in the sector absolutely can and should pay their share.
What we are worried about is this: when rates jump and margins shrink, the first thing to go is often culture. If a commercially-owned venue decides “not worth it” on a spreadsheet, it can disappear overnight. A good example of this is a venue like Ulster Sports Club. If rate hikes tip the balance for the group that owns it, we don’t just lose a venue, we lose dozens of nights a year where different scenes, sounds and communities come together.
What we’d like to see
If we had the capacity to campaign on this properly, our asks would look something like:
Targeted rates relief for cultural spaces and a specific relief scheme for:
grassroots music venues (using something like the Music Venue Trust definition, adapted for NI)
late-night, dancefloor-led spaces that clearly provide cultural and community value
Recognise these spaces as cultural infrastructure
The UK Government has already decided that film studios are “critical creative infrastructure” and given them long-term business rates relief. We’d like to see music and nightlife spaces treated similarly, not as just another way to extract rent from city centres
A a serious look at:
how the valuation system treats event-led spaces
whether it is skewed towards what a building could earn as something else (hotel, offices, luxury bar), rather than what a grassroots venue actually makes
how to stop small, community-driven spaces from being priced out by paper valuations they can never realistically trade to
Keep this focused on independents, not giants
Any NI scheme should put independent and community-led venues first, not just whoever has the loudest lobbyist. We don’t support across-the-board giveaways to huge chains and “billion-dollar companies” while grassroots spaces are left to sink
Why we’re not fronting a big rates campaign (yet)
We also want to be really honest about where we’re at as a charity.
Free The Night is 100% volunteer-led. We currently have no core funding and no paid staff. Everything we do - policy work, meetings, research, media, socials, events - happens on top of our normal jobs, late at night, and very often using annual leave and unpaid time.
On top of that, a big chunk of our energy right now is going into simply trying to secure enough funding to hire even one part-time staff member, so we can keep going without burning out. That means there are loads of important things we can’t do properly, even when we know exactly what we’d say.
Last week, we responded to a governance consultation on Competition and Markets Authority issues - the kind of thing that really matters for nightlife and fair markets. It would have been brilliant to run a public push alongside that, explain the issues, design clear assets, and help our audience respond, but we simply didn’t have the time to do the complex policy work and build a public campaign around it.
This happens a lot. There’s work going on in the background that we barely talk about publicly, not because we’re hiding it, but because:
we don’t have the hours to turn it into good, clear comms
we don’t want to fire out half-baked posts that look and feel rubbish
we’d rather do fewer campaigns properly than a constant stream of scrambled ones
In the next few weeks, we’re also going to be sharing more on a potential court case and the CMA angle on licensing - both of which are already stretching us to the limit.
So when we say we can’t lead a full campaign on business rates right now, it’s not because we don’t think it matters. It’s because, as a tiny volunteer outfit, we’re already at breaking point, it’s costing our team money and time out of their own pockets, and without at least some paid capacity, taking on another big fight would mean dropping the ones we’re already in the middle of.
If you’ve got a healthy wallet - or you’re part of an organisation that does - and you value what we do, then helping us fund even one part-time role would genuinely change what we can take on. We know exactly how we’d campaign on this if we had the capacity.
What people can do right now
We’re going to keep our main campaigning capacity on licensing and competition in the short term. But if this issue matters to you, you can still act:
If you run a venue or bar:
Check your draft valuation on the Reval 2026 list and get advice if you’re facing a huge jump
Talk to other local venues and promoters about what this means for your area’s cultural life and share those stories
If you’re a punter, artist or promoter:
Email your MLAs and ask them to push for targeted rates relief and fairer valuations for grassroots venues and dancefloors
Point out that England now has specific relief for pubs and live music venues, and that NI needs its own model that actually includes the club and dancefloor spaces where so much of our culture happens
As Free The Night, we’ll keep doing what we do best: showing the value of culture and community at night, and backing the people who make it happen. Business rates are now part of that story, and we’ll keep an eye on them, even if we can’t lead every fight at once.
