I’ve always enjoyed a variety of corporate transactional and advisory tax work. At Boodle Hatfield that means working with colleagues in our private client, property and corporate teams. Proposed changes to the non-dom rules have created uncertainty, but people still want to buy UK real estate and invest in UK businesses.
If you could make one change to tax, what would it be?
The UK state relies to an extraordinary extent on unpaid tax collectors – businesses collecting VAT, employers collecting income tax and NICs under PAYE, individuals and companies paying tax under self-assessment, SDLT, SDRT, you name it. But ultimately we do need a tax authority that is able to check what is going on, and which is responsive to the needs of taxpayers trying to comply with their obligations. While there are undoubtedly many dedicated and talented individuals working at HMRC, and technology can assist, it seems to me that HMRC has been overtasked and underfunded in recent years. Whether it is dealing with routine correspondence, answering telephone calls or responding to clearance requests, it feels as though services levels are considerably down and below what taxpayers should reasonably expect.
Are there any new rules that are causing a particular problem?
The proposals from both the previous Conservative and the new Labour governments on the reform of the remittance basis and the taxation of ‘non-doms’ has been high on the agenda for my private client colleagues since March (indeed, since reform was seriously mooted last year). I attended a recent talk where an eminent KC gave a spirited defence of (as he described it) the flexibility of the common law test of domicile, and scorned seemingly objective but hard-edged and mechanical rules like the statutory residence test that can be difficult to apply in practice to real situations where evidence may just not be available. To misquote Mandy Rice-Davies, I couldn’t help thinking ‘he would say that, wouldn’t he’, but for example the UK’s substance over form approach to accounting has stood us in good stead by and large, compared to the US preference for detailed rules.
Has a recent tax case caught your eye?
A fair amount of the work I do on a daily basis involves an element of SDLT, so it was interesting to see the Upper Tribunal supporting the decision of the First-Tier Tribunal in the Suterwalla case recently ([2024] UKUT 188 (TCC)) and comparing that to the decision in the Lynch case some weeks before ([2024] UKFTT 350 (TC)). In Suterwalla, a house with a paddock was determined to be not wholly residential, so subject to SDLT at the lower non-residential rates, but in Lynch a much larger area of land in agricultural use was still part of the ‘grounds’ of a rural dwelling. As the Suterwalla decision makes clear, an appeal is not an opportunity to relitigate the facts, and the lower courts and tribunals should be supported when they reach decisions open to them on basis of the facts and the law, even if a different panel might conceivably have reached a different result. But frankly, it is not acceptable that such large amounts of tax – up to 15% of the sale price, or 17% for non-resident purchasers – depend on such vagaries. At some point, I expect to see the law changed to apportion a sale price between residential and non-residential parts so each can be taxed at different rates.
Finally, you might not know this about me but…
I discovered a galaxy. Before I was a tax lawyer I was an astronomer (no, not an astrologer). Part of my doctorate included using data gathered by the venerable 25m radio telescope at Dwingeloo in the north of the Netherlands – which was for a period in the 1950s the largest radio telescope in the world – to look for the characteristic 21cm radio emission from neutral atomic hydrogen gas in galaxies hidden behind the Milky Way (emitted when the spin of the electron in the atom flips from parallel to the spin of the proton to the slightly lower energy antiparallel state).
I’ve always enjoyed a variety of corporate transactional and advisory tax work. At Boodle Hatfield that means working with colleagues in our private client, property and corporate teams. Proposed changes to the non-dom rules have created uncertainty, but people still want to buy UK real estate and invest in UK businesses.
If you could make one change to tax, what would it be?
The UK state relies to an extraordinary extent on unpaid tax collectors – businesses collecting VAT, employers collecting income tax and NICs under PAYE, individuals and companies paying tax under self-assessment, SDLT, SDRT, you name it. But ultimately we do need a tax authority that is able to check what is going on, and which is responsive to the needs of taxpayers trying to comply with their obligations. While there are undoubtedly many dedicated and talented individuals working at HMRC, and technology can assist, it seems to me that HMRC has been overtasked and underfunded in recent years. Whether it is dealing with routine correspondence, answering telephone calls or responding to clearance requests, it feels as though services levels are considerably down and below what taxpayers should reasonably expect.
Are there any new rules that are causing a particular problem?
The proposals from both the previous Conservative and the new Labour governments on the reform of the remittance basis and the taxation of ‘non-doms’ has been high on the agenda for my private client colleagues since March (indeed, since reform was seriously mooted last year). I attended a recent talk where an eminent KC gave a spirited defence of (as he described it) the flexibility of the common law test of domicile, and scorned seemingly objective but hard-edged and mechanical rules like the statutory residence test that can be difficult to apply in practice to real situations where evidence may just not be available. To misquote Mandy Rice-Davies, I couldn’t help thinking ‘he would say that, wouldn’t he’, but for example the UK’s substance over form approach to accounting has stood us in good stead by and large, compared to the US preference for detailed rules.
Has a recent tax case caught your eye?
A fair amount of the work I do on a daily basis involves an element of SDLT, so it was interesting to see the Upper Tribunal supporting the decision of the First-Tier Tribunal in the Suterwalla case recently ([2024] UKUT 188 (TCC)) and comparing that to the decision in the Lynch case some weeks before ([2024] UKFTT 350 (TC)). In Suterwalla, a house with a paddock was determined to be not wholly residential, so subject to SDLT at the lower non-residential rates, but in Lynch a much larger area of land in agricultural use was still part of the ‘grounds’ of a rural dwelling. As the Suterwalla decision makes clear, an appeal is not an opportunity to relitigate the facts, and the lower courts and tribunals should be supported when they reach decisions open to them on basis of the facts and the law, even if a different panel might conceivably have reached a different result. But frankly, it is not acceptable that such large amounts of tax – up to 15% of the sale price, or 17% for non-resident purchasers – depend on such vagaries. At some point, I expect to see the law changed to apportion a sale price between residential and non-residential parts so each can be taxed at different rates.
Finally, you might not know this about me but…
I discovered a galaxy. Before I was a tax lawyer I was an astronomer (no, not an astrologer). Part of my doctorate included using data gathered by the venerable 25m radio telescope at Dwingeloo in the north of the Netherlands – which was for a period in the 1950s the largest radio telescope in the world – to look for the characteristic 21cm radio emission from neutral atomic hydrogen gas in galaxies hidden behind the Milky Way (emitted when the spin of the electron in the atom flips from parallel to the spin of the proton to the slightly lower energy antiparallel state).
