Archives for August 2011

If you help run a local sports club, i.e. the kid’s football team, tennis club or other organised sports activity, you may be interested to learn you can apply to HMRC to be treated as a registered community amateur sports club, a CASC.

If your club fits the following criteria there are a number of significant tax exemptions. The main qualifying conditions are:

• the club must be open to the whole community
• the club’s main purpose must be to provide facilities for eligible sports, and to encourage people to take part in them
• the club must be organised on an amateur basis

The club must also be able to show that:

• it is set up and provides its facilities in an eligible area
• it is managed by fit and proper persons

The corporation tax reliefs that you can expect if you do register exempt the following sources of income:

• trading profits, if the turnover is no more than £30,000 per year (if turnover is more than £30,000 all trading profits are taxable)
• income from letting property, if the rent is no more than £20,000 per year (if letting income is more than £20,000 no exemption is possible)
• any interest your CASC gets
• any capital gains it makes
• any Gift Aid donations

Additionally you may qualify for relief from non-domestic rates. In England, Wales and Scotland this amounts to 80% rates relief. Contact your Local Authority finance department to apply.

There’s a lot of information published about the amount of capital gains tax you will need to pay if you sell a chargeable asset. And of course you can sell chargeable assets and the first £10,600 of taxable gains is exempt from a tax charge in the current tax year, 2011-12.

We thought it might be of interest to list items that can be sold with no fear of capital gains tax arising on the sale. Here’s HMRC’s published list and please note that a chattel, referred to in the list, is the personal variety; defined as ‘an item of movable, personal property’. In plain English personal effects or household goods:

• private motor vehicles
• an individual’s only or main residence (having gardens or grounds of half a hectare or less) which has been occupied as such throughout the period of ownership
• tangible moveable property, that is items such as household goods and personal effects, worth less than £6,000
• chattels with a predictable life of 50 years or less (unless used for the purposes of a trade, profession or vocation)
• SAYE (Save-as-you-earn) contracts
• National Savings Certificates
• Premium Bonds
• British Government Securities
• qualifying corporate bonds
• certain investments in Personal Equity Plans, Individual Savings Accounts and under the Business Expansion Scheme
• the receipt of personal injury compensation
• the receipt of winnings from betting, including pool betting, or lotteries or games with prizes.