AN ambitious new Watchet tourism project which would include a museum, a café and a small theatre, is in danger of being scrapped because of a disputed £22,000-plus business rates bill which is growing by £1,000 a month.
Electronics graduate Neil Wilson bought Watchet’s Victorian Anchor Inn last year after it had closed its doors two years earlier.
In January, he received planning permission to turn the near-derelict building into a media and entertainments centre.
The ground floor would house the nostalgia-themed Radio Museum that Neil has run at Tropiquaria, Washford Cross, since 1993 and which attracts over 50,000 visitors a year.
“What threatens to wreck the whole project is that the rating authorities insist that the Anchor is still a hotel and should be rated accordingly, although it has been shut for two years and is now a building site,” Neil said.
“They have put rateable value of £23,750 a year on the place of which I have to pay 49 per cent. The debt currently stands at £22,400, which I simply haven’t got.
“I have asked the HMRC Valuation Office Agency to do what is normally done in these cases – suspend the rating while the work is being done and then reassess it when it has been converted to its new use.
“But they insist that the hotel valuation stays until the new project is up and running and won’t budge on suspending the rates."
Full story in the Free Press (August 12)