Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, pursuant to the Answer of 30 January 2025 to Question 26623 on Schools: Uniforms, what is the evidential basis to support that (a) expanding the existing relief may not reduce the price of school uniforms and (b) VAT relief would not remain tightly targeted at those whom it would be intended to benefit.

There is a wide range of academic research into how VAT changes affect prices, which supports the conclusion that pass-through is typically only partial. This includes, for example, an International Monetary Fund study which examined the pass through of VAT changes for 17 countries over 1999-2013 and ‘What Goes Up May Not Come Down:

Asymmetric Incidence of Value-Added Taxes’ by Benzarti et al. which shows that prices respond more to VAT increases than decreases.

To ensure that the current scope of the relief is carefully targeted at those it is intended to benefit and is not used to circumvent paying VAT on clothing for adults, this relief is limited to clothing designed and labelled for children under the age of 14. The limit is set in relation to when the clothing measurements begin to merge with the general adult population, who could wear clothing such as plain white shirts or black shoes, with uniforms in a great number of secondary schools now including such non-branded items.