LET-A Review of Land and Buildings Transaction Tax

Description

As part of the Scottish Budget 2025-26 announcement on 4 December 2024, Ministers committed to a review of LBTT legislation taking place in 2025. The review will start in Spring 2025 and will consider various aspects of the residential and non-residential LBTT regimes to ensure the policy intent is still met. SG committed to engage extensively with taxpayers and stakeholders throughout. The review will take place over the remainder of the current parliamentary term and will support decisions in the next Parliament on whether any legislative changes should be brought forward. The review will focus on two overarching areas: - Non-residential Leases - Conveyances (residential and non-residential) The non-residential leases element will be undertaken by the Land and Buildings Transaction Tax Policy Team. Scottish Government are seeking external support to review specific aspects of Conveyances. Lot 1: At this time, different aspects of the LBTT legislation are reviewed on an ad hoc basis by policy officials. Issues are usually identified and discussed in detail with key external stakeholders as well as internal stakeholders such as Revenue Scotland. Currently, changes to the legislation are often a result of responding to changes to wider UK property legislation, or in response to stakeholder demand or tribunal decisions. This leaves little scope for the team to undertake a broader evaluation of ‘non-urgent’ policy areas, and it is these areas which will form the basis of the review. We anticipate the majority of the work will be desk-based, consisting of research and analysis of existing statistics, information and comparison with wider UK property transaction taxes (possibly further afield). Additionally, the successful bidder will be expected to engage stakeholders, whether through consultation, through in-person/virtual events, or surveys to fill any identified data gaps required to successfully and reliably answer each of the questions.