This is Revenue Scotland’s fifth annual statistics publication summarising trends in the devolved taxes. The publication generally covers the period from 1 April 2015 to 31 March 2022.
In some cases, for brevity, data are only presented for the latest five years. Older data for most figures and tables can be found in our previous annual publications.
Revenue Scotland also publishes monthly official statistics on LBTT and quarterly official statistics on SLfT. More up-to-date high-level statistics are available from these two publications, but they do not contain some of the more detailed data found in this publication. Both publications can be found on the Revenue Scotland website and the open data is found on statistics.gov.scot.
The purpose of this annual publication is to summarise and provide further commentary on Revenue Scotland’s official statistics. It also provides information that is not available in the
monthly and quarterly official statistics publications, for example:
• Sub-Scotland estimates of LBTT declared due and the number of LBTT returns received.
• Estimates of LBTT revenue forgone to reliefs and the number of LBTT returns received with LBTT revenue forgone to reliefs.
• Taxable (SLfT) disposals by European Waste Catalogue (EWC) code.
A record high for LBTT revenues from residential conveyances was recorded in 2021/22. This comes after a large drop in 2020/21, due to the restrictions introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic. There had been a steady year-on-year increase between 2015/16 and 2019/20.
Scottish Landfill Tax revenue has fallen from £149 million in 2015/16 to £125 million in 2021/22. Total tonnage of declared taxable disposables was 2,028,700 tonnes. This is up 13% on the previous year, but down slightly (less than 1%) on the last pre-pandemic year (2019/20). Discounting the pandemic-affected year 2020/21, there is a decreasing trend in tonnage of waste going to landfill.
Other key points from the publication highlight that:
- Residential LBTT revenue excluding ADS is dominated by transactions in the £325,000 to £750,000 band, which made up 58% of residential revenue in 2021/22 while making up 13% of residential returns. 40% of residential returns received in 2021/22 fell into the nil rate (£0 to £145,000) tax band, the lowest seen in a year, and continuing the year-on-year decrease from 53% in 2015/16.
- £827 million in LBTT revenues were declared due during 2021/22, including £161 million net Annual Dwelling Supplement (ADS) payments, some portion of which may later be reclaimed.
- In 2021/22, residential conveyances accounted for 69% (£573 million) of total LBTT declared due, non-residential conveyances accounted for 28% (£227 million) and leases accounted for 3% (£26 million).
- £125 million of SLfT declared due in 2021/22 represents an increase of 18% from 2020/21, and an increase of 6% on 2019/20. Previously there was a year on year downward trend, which had been driven by decreases in the disposal of standard rate waste to landfill (1.35 million tonnes in 2021/22, up 15% from the previous year).
The full report is available along with supporting material to download. It includes an appendix detailing how the numbers in the statistics publication relate to the accounting figures reported in Revenue Scotland’s recently published Annual Report and Financial Statements.
Read Annual Summary of Trends in the Devolved Taxes 2021-22 report.