VAT, the NHS and business activities

The recent decision of the First-tier Tribunal (FTT) in Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust v HMRC [2021] UKFTT 71 provides further guidance on the VAT treatment of the business activities of the NHS.

The NHS trust is a statutory body providing hospital and health services as part of the NHS. In this case the trust charged patients visitors and hospital staff for the right to park vehicles at its hospitals. It was common ground that the trust’s statutory functions as an NHS body are not ‘economic activities’ for the purposes of article 13 of the Principal VAT Directive (PVD). Accordingly the trust’s provision of NHS medical services is a non-business activity and falls outside the scope of VAT. The question for the FTT was whether...