The Inspector has placed a stopwatch beside Scotland’s promised rapid review of business rates. The watch is working. The review is waiting for people.
On 23 June, Deputy First Minister Jenny Gilruth told Parliament that the Scottish Government would establish an independent panel to examine allegedly anomalous valuations from the 2026 non-domestic rates revaluation. It would report within three months of its appointment. This was described as rapid. The crucial instrument in that sentence is not the stopwatch. It is the phrase “of its appointment”.
More than four months later, the appointment has not happened. A written answer published by the Scottish Parliament records that, as of 29 October, Public Finance Minister Hannah Mary Goodlad had written to potential members and Parliament would be told when appointments were confirmed. She gave no date for confirmation or for work to begin.
The official position is therefore unusually easy to measure. The panel has prospective members, no confirmed members in the public record, no published start date and a three-month reporting clock that cannot begin until appointment. Government has built a rapid review with a speedometer but has not yet inserted the key.
This is not merely a Westminster Village game played in Edinburgh with better masonry. The 2026 revaluation took effect on 1 April and changed the rateable values used to calculate bills for shops, pubs, hotels, offices and other commercial properties across Scotland. In June, ministers acknowledged concerns about consistency, transparency, delayed accurate bills and apparently anomalous valuations. A statutory appeal route exists, but the promised panel was meant to ask whether the trouble was systemic rather than a collection of isolated grievances.
The timetable has already undergone one inspection. When Holyrood’s housing and local government committee asked on 9 September for the remit and reporting date, Gilruth said she expected official advice that day and would engage with it “in the coming days”. On 29 October, invitations were still invitations. The Inspector has compared the two documents. The coming days appear to have developed tenure.
The Scottish Government can point to a relief package worth close to £1 billion, reductions in the tax rates used for the new cycle and existing appeals. Those are real measures and they are separate from this panel. They do not transform an unappointed review into an operating one, any more than putting three fire extinguishers beside an empty committee table constitutes a meeting.
There is another distinction worth keeping clear. This rapid panel concerns alleged anomalies in the 2026 revaluation. It is not the separate review of how licensed hospitality premises are valued. Scotland has enough business-rates reviews to require name badges, but only one of them was announced in June with the word “rapid” attached.
The Scottish Parliament’s own October briefing still described the panel in the future tense. That matters because the design puts the deadline after appointment. Every week spent appointing members delays both the start and the report while allowing ministers to keep the original three-month promise technically immaculate. The clock remains pristine because it is still in its box.
The Herald reported the delay on Wednesday morning, saying no panel member had been appointed and businesses faced another year of unaffordable bills. The first part is supported by the 29 October parliamentary answer. The second is the newspaper’s characterisation of the pressure facing firms, not a Government forecast and not proof that every business will pay more. Revaluation redistributes liability: some bills rise, some fall and reliefs change the result.
What can now be said without embroidery is narrower and worse for the adjective. Ministers announced a rapid independent review in June. In September, appointments were a decision for the coming days. At the end of October, invitations had gone out but appointments were not confirmed. The three-month reporting period had not begun.
The Inspector will leave the stopwatch running. It may eventually record a brisk piece of work by a serious panel. At present it is recording the time taken to assemble the people who will decide how briskly to review the thing that businesses were told would be reviewed rapidly. Scotland’s high streets have met administrative velocity before. They know to bring a chair.
