Background The Government consulted in January on the design of a merged, simplified R&D tax relief and committed to publishing draft legislation in the summer. The draft legislation setting out the proposed design of a merged R&D relief was published today and can be found here. Alongside this, the Government has also published a summary…

HMRC has released its annual data analysing the tax gap. Issued on 22 June, the figures show that the tax gap has remained at 4.8%. This is the difference between what HMRC expects the total tax take to be for 2021/22 and the actual tax received. HMRC has previously said that the tax gap has…

The Spring Finance Bill 2023 (SFB 2023) was published on 23 March 2023. Officially known as the Finance (No 2) Bill, because it is the second Finance Bill of the 2022–23 Parliamentary session, it was also referred to as the SFB 2023 in Spring Budget 2023. As noted above, SFB 2023 is the second Finance…

Jeremy Hunt has presented his first full Budget since becoming Chancellor.  Much of the detail was hidden away in the accompanying Budget supporting documents and we won’t know the full details/implications until the Finance Bill is published sometime in the next week or two. The main measures as we currently understand them are as below.…

The four “Es” On Friday 27 January the Chancellor set out a plan to help lift the UK’s economic growth. As part of this, he said that the strategy would focus on four pillars, or “four Es”: enterprise, education, employment and everywhere. He said that the government planned to achieve growth in multiple sectors across…

Introduction The Chancellor has delivered what amounts to a full Budget. There are huge tax increases (many by so-called stealth means) and some cuts or delays to public expenditure (but probably not as many as had been expected). In many ways it’s not unlike George Osborne’s austerity budget of 2010. Yesterday, the Office for National…

For 35 years I have broadcast, written articles, blogged and generally discussed the effect of fiscal policy in a politically neutral way. I’ve seen it as my job to inform my clients and contacts as to how tax changes will affect them and/or their businesses. I’ve adopted the mantra of Alfred Lord Tennyson that “Ours…

The Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, has today presented what has variously been described as a “fiscal event” or a “mini-Budget”. In fact, there were far more significant tax changes announced than we have seen in many full Budgets in recent years. We expect a full Budget later in the autumn and the Chancellor announced today that…

Following the review of R&D tax reliefs launched at Budget 2021, the government has just announced the following measures, which will apply for accounting periods beginning on or after 1 April 2023. Extending qualifying expenditure To incentivise R&D using modern computational approaches, the government is extending the scope of qualifying expenditures to include the costs of datasets and of…

Summary The Chancellor has announced his Spring Statement. As part of this, Mr Sunak set out what is called the government’s Tax Plan. This three-part plan is, he claims, designed to strengthen our economy. It will help families with the cost of living, it will support growth and it will ensure the proceeds of growth…