IN BRIEF

On Wednesday morning I asked ChatGPT to write a UK budget to plug a 22bn black hole and second on its list of suggestions was to put corporation tax up by 2% to raise 5bn a year. Happily for corporates, the Chancellor had...

The private equity industry in the UK was on the edge of its seat waiting to see how the new Labour government would act to close the carried interest tax loophole, as promised in their manifesto. There has been much speculation...

In the first Budget given by a Labour government in 14 years, the end of the remittance basis, which has existed in the UK tax system since the introduction of income tax by Pitt in 1799, was definitively confirmed. A key question is whether the...

On the eve of Halloween, our first woman Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, managed to give us a much less frightening CGT experience than had previously been feared. Many of the pre-Budget rumours, such as equalising CGT with income tax rates and the...

From April 2026, two of the main IHT reliefs, Agricultural Property Relief (APR) and Business Property Relief (BPR), are changing:100% relief is limited to the first 1m of combined qualifying agricultural and business assets and...

Although not mentioned in the Budget speech, the accompanying documents included a policy paper and draft legislation proposing changes to the EOTs regime. Most of these changes will have an effect for disposals to an employee ownership trust on or...

On the stamp duty front, the Budget announcements (or lack of them) were unexpected.On the one hand, the Chancellor announced a chunky increase to the SDLT surcharge for those buying second homes. That surcharge is rising from 3% to 5% with...

Good news - the Chancellor has kept to her word with no change to the April 2024 pension tax reforms: the two new allowances LSA and LSBDA are still in place, there is no return to the Lifetime Allowance, no change to the higher Annual Allowance of...

The Budget contains some measures supportive of the green transition and some that are challenging for the North Seas oil and gas businesses. Taken overall the Budget increases the tax burden on the offshore industry, but there will be some...

Surprisingly, umbrella company reform made it into the Budget speech. However, the initial optimism soon gave way to shock. In the policy paper 'Tackling non-compliance in the umbrella company market, the government announced that the...