Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, pursuant to the Answer on 8 January 2018 to Question 120804, what recent assessment he has made of the annual cost to the Exchequer of providing intermediary relief to those claiming it under existing Stamp Duty Reserve Tax rules.

Intermediary relief was introduced in 1997 to safeguard liquidity and ensure market making in the London equity market is not subject to unsustainably high effective tax rates.

HMRC cannot provide an estimate of the annual cost to the Exchequer of providing intermediary relief to those claiming it under existing Stamp Duty Reserve Tax rules. Although information on the usage of this relief is reported to HMRC, the relevant data is not held in a centralised form, and the cost of compiling it for statistical purposes is disproportionate. More information on reliefs where costs are unavailable can be found in the “Tax Reliefs in Force in 2016-17 or 2017-18: Estimates of cost unavailable” publication below: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/675231/Dec_17_allow_rels_estimates_unavailable_Final.pdf

Like with other areas of the tax system, the Government continually monitors intermediary relief to ensure that it is appropriately targeted and effective in delivering it’s policy objective.