Meeting of the Parliament 06 March 2018
I refer members to my entry in the register of members’ interests with respect to my membership of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland. I also warn members that my speech will contain some repetition of what others have said.
I thank the cabinet secretary for bringing the bill forward—it is both welcome and necessary. An anomaly in relation to the additional dwelling supplement meant that it was chargeable when spouses, civil partners and cohabitants jointly replaced a home that was owned by just one of them. It is right that we now apply last year’s action to end that anomaly retroactively.
I echo Murdo Fraser’s point regarding advertising the change. I appreciate that Revenue Scotland cannot identify those affected and will advertise the change on its website. However, that does not seem wholly sufficient. Can the cabinet secretary clarify whether any third parties, such as professional bodies or estate agencies, have been contacted in relation to notifying the public of the change?
As welcome as the latest fix is, it only scratches the surface. The Law Society of Scotland has highlighted several additional anomalies with the ADS in its submission to the Finance and Constitution Committee. One of those additional anomalies relates to couples who are separating. In situations in which one partner goes on to buy a new home, relief is not available. Equally, there is no relief for couples who were not previously living together prior to purchasing a joint property. Neither situation seems fair, and those who are caught up in such cases might feel that they are being penalised for circumstances that may be outside their control. Nor is it fair that the SNP’s land and buildings transaction tax contains no dependent dwelling exemption, as stamp duty land tax does in the rest of the United Kingdom. It is more than reasonable to consider that the purchase of a property with another connected to it should be considered as an overall single transaction rather than as the purchase of an additional residence.
We should not address such issues in isolation. The bill is welcome, but it is narrow and cumbersome. A lot of time and effort has gone into ending one relatively small, though significant, anomaly in a specific aspect of one particular tax—a case of deficient SNP legislation leading to a deficient fix, leading to yet another fix. A new approach is needed, and I think that the cabinet secretary alluded to that in his speech.