Brendan McGurk analyses the Patersons decision, in which the Upper Tribunal dismissed the appeal from a landfill site operator (LSO) for the repayment of landfill tax on biomass, and what this means for other LSOs
Landfill gas (and in particular methane) is produced naturally in the course of the decomposition of biodegradable waste material (or biomass): a landfill site operator (LSO) is not required to do anything to instigate its production.
The appellant in Patersons of Greenoakhill Ltd v HMRC [2014] UKUT 225 was required by its site operator’s permit to have a ‘landfill gas management system’ in place for cells at its site (where sites are divided up into many individual cells each of which receive waste material). The appellant therefore installed expensive equipment to capture the gas and convert it into...
