How to avoid business rates – keep snails!

A Liverpool city centre office was home to a snail farm for over a year in order to avoid tax, according to the BBC.

Some 15 crates of snails had been kept of the lower ground floor of an office building in Dale Street.

It was then asserted that under current rules this would qualify as “agricultural use”, and this part of the building was thus exempt business rates!

The firm renting the space said it was a legitimate snail farming business.

However, some of the boxes had barely two snails in them, and legitimate snail farmers said you need thousands of snails to create a real business.