One minute with Chris Nyland, consultant at Scammell & Nyland
What’s keeping you busy at work?
The consultation on zero-rating sites for social housing, which is the nearest I’ve been to a change of VAT law since the £1 capital goods scheme for self-storage. I’ve also been polishing a plain English abridgement of the option to tax anti-avoidance rules for the imminent Scammell & Nyland conference.
What do you know now that you wish you’d known at the start of your career?
I used to agonise over how the courts might interpret two words in the SDLT code. I might have let my hair down a bit more had I known that litigation in that tax would be mired in arguments about washing dishes in a shower, and about toilets plumbed into the corner of a ‘kitchen’ (shudder).
If you could make one change to tax, what would it be?
SDLT on rent, as implemented, is awful. Its overreach can require painstaking calculations and compliance, for often trivial liabilities, on a broad range of commercially common events. Its complexity hits the retail and office sectors particularly hard: almost every tenant takes possession of their demise early; and so many ‘hold over’ on expiry. Just bake it into business rates instead.
Has a recent tax case caught your eye?
I have to pick a pair: Compound Photonics [2026] UKFTT 985 (TC) and St Patrick’s [2026] EWCA
Civ 852, proof positive that HMRC will say whatever it takes in the moment in the (fruitless) pursuit of victory. In St Patrick’s, they unsuccessfully trashed a previous Court of Appeal judgment (LIFE [2020] EWCA Civ 452)that was in their favour. And in Compound Photonics they suggested with a straight face, and to raised eyebrows, that a sale of a development by a property SPV would not constitute a business activity.
Any new trends you’re seeing in tax?
HMRC’s increasing tendency to overestimate their need, and ability, to control behaviour through law – and to mess things up as a result. Per Lawrence Lessig, no law is needed to stop skyscraper theft: gravity does a superior job. HMRC need to realise when their job is already done better elsewhere. Zero-rating sites for social housing could have happened a year ago had HMRC acknowledged housing associations’ regulatory regimes. And CIS reg 20A (of SI 2005/2045) (see below) could have worked first time if HMRC had reflected on whether people would really enter into leases just to cashflow a CIS deduction.
Are there any new tax rules that are causing a particular problem?
A tenant procuring its landlord’s works often receives payment with a CIS deduction, but must pay the building contractor gross. CIS reg 20A was supposed to prevent this. But its black letter is a mess to which guidance has applied neither polish nor glitter. Before reg 20A, the law was brutal, but consistently and clearly so; now, it’s unworkably murky and capricious.
Finally, you might not know this about me but...
Thirty years ago, whilst a student in Taipei, I played Father Christmas on Taiwanese national TV and met David Hasselhoff. I’m also the first (and probably last) person to write that sentence.
One minute with Chris Nyland, consultant at Scammell & Nyland
What’s keeping you busy at work?
The consultation on zero-rating sites for social housing, which is the nearest I’ve been to a change of VAT law since the £1 capital goods scheme for self-storage. I’ve also been polishing a plain English abridgement of the option to tax anti-avoidance rules for the imminent Scammell & Nyland conference.
What do you know now that you wish you’d known at the start of your career?
I used to agonise over how the courts might interpret two words in the SDLT code. I might have let my hair down a bit more had I known that litigation in that tax would be mired in arguments about washing dishes in a shower, and about toilets plumbed into the corner of a ‘kitchen’ (shudder).
If you could make one change to tax, what would it be?
SDLT on rent, as implemented, is awful. Its overreach can require painstaking calculations and compliance, for often trivial liabilities, on a broad range of commercially common events. Its complexity hits the retail and office sectors particularly hard: almost every tenant takes possession of their demise early; and so many ‘hold over’ on expiry. Just bake it into business rates instead.
Has a recent tax case caught your eye?
I have to pick a pair: Compound Photonics [2026] UKFTT 985 (TC) and St Patrick’s [2026] EWCA
Civ 852, proof positive that HMRC will say whatever it takes in the moment in the (fruitless) pursuit of victory. In St Patrick’s, they unsuccessfully trashed a previous Court of Appeal judgment (LIFE [2020] EWCA Civ 452)that was in their favour. And in Compound Photonics they suggested with a straight face, and to raised eyebrows, that a sale of a development by a property SPV would not constitute a business activity.
Any new trends you’re seeing in tax?
HMRC’s increasing tendency to overestimate their need, and ability, to control behaviour through law – and to mess things up as a result. Per Lawrence Lessig, no law is needed to stop skyscraper theft: gravity does a superior job. HMRC need to realise when their job is already done better elsewhere. Zero-rating sites for social housing could have happened a year ago had HMRC acknowledged housing associations’ regulatory regimes. And CIS reg 20A (of SI 2005/2045) (see below) could have worked first time if HMRC had reflected on whether people would really enter into leases just to cashflow a CIS deduction.
Are there any new tax rules that are causing a particular problem?
A tenant procuring its landlord’s works often receives payment with a CIS deduction, but must pay the building contractor gross. CIS reg 20A was supposed to prevent this. But its black letter is a mess to which guidance has applied neither polish nor glitter. Before reg 20A, the law was brutal, but consistently and clearly so; now, it’s unworkably murky and capricious.
Finally, you might not know this about me but...
Thirty years ago, whilst a student in Taipei, I played Father Christmas on Taiwanese national TV and met David Hasselhoff. I’m also the first (and probably last) person to write that sentence.
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