I'm struggling to remove the ability to 'rate item' here: www.honley.info/news-views.html

Is there a simple way to just disable the feature site wide?

Hello Jon,

The option to enable/ disable rating is located in the category's settings.
You can disable it from there and set a category as a master category so you won't have to set it over and over again.

If you are comfortable with coding you can read this getk2.org/documentation/tutorials/174-templating-with-k2-and-the-concepts-of-sub-templates and remove it from the item.php and category_item.php file.