Kerching: Supermarkets win court ruling over £300m cash machine case

Supermarket giants including Sainsbury’s and Tesco have won a £300m court dispute over business rates for cash machines outside shops.

Today’s ruling from The Court of Appeal decided in favour of the retail giants, who are set to be refunded hundreds of millions of pounds from the government and local authorities.

For eight years retailers have been liable to pay business rates on their cash machines, but an appeal from several major supermarkets today overturned the decision.

The Valuation Office (VOA) – which brought the original case – can still petition the Supreme Court should it wish to do so.

“This is overall a great result,” said John Webber, head of business rates at Colliers International. "We are delighted the Courts saw sense. The one fly in the ointment would be if the Supreme Court allowed the VOA to appeal further. We hope no further taxpayers' money is wasted in pursuing this unnecessary and unfair claim."

He continued: "There was a real fear that if the VOA had been successful this would have opened up the floodgates to assess up to 400,000 vending operations which would have been calamitous for both retailers and those operators. Hopefully, this puts the VOA zealots back in the box and they get on with dealing with the outstanding appeals instead of cooking the golden goose named Retail."