We have introduced guidance for our new tax relief on Green Freeports which come into effect on 1 October 2023.
The guidance includes the overview of the tax relief, key terms, how to claim the relief and also how to withdraw the relief.
In his Programme for Government statement on 5 September, the First Minister Humza Yousaf, announced that the Scottish Government is pursuing the devolution of powers to introduce an Building Safety Levy in Scotland.
The levy will be payable by those operating in the residential property development sector. The exact scope and structure of the levy in Scotland will be designed by the Scottish Government in due course.
The Scottish Landfill Tax (Standard Rate and Lower Rate) Order 2023 has now been approved by the Scottish Parliament and came into effect on 1 April 2023. As a result, taxable disposals made or treated as made on or after 1 April 2023 will be subject to the following rates of SLfT:
Revenue Scotland has decided to remove the 12 month authority to act time limit to allow us to provide a more efficient service to our taxpayers and agents.
From 19 March 2023, the 12 month authority to act limit for all future tax returns received will no longer be applicable. Agents will retain authorisation status unless we are notified by either the taxpayer or the agent.
Conveyance tax returns submitted prior to 19 March 2023
Following a recent review of Land and Buildings Transaction Tax - Additional Dwelling Supplement, The Scottish Government have published proposed legislative changes in a consultation and are inviting responses from all interested parties.
Councils would no longer pay a tax on additional properties when supported by the Scottish Government to buy properties for affordable housing stock, under proposals in a new consultation.
All data were extracted as at 31 May 2022 but, in keeping with Revenue Scotland’s revisions policy, some of the data relating to earlier years has not been updated. For LBTT and SLfT, only data for 2020/21 onwards has been updated (and for sub-Scotland geographies, only the most recent year was updated).
Reliefs
There are various data quality issues with reliefs information collected from LBTT returns in previous years, although these issues do not affect the total LBTT declared due.
The purpose of this appendix is to explain how Revenue Scotland’s monthly LBTT statistics, quarterly SLfT statistics, and annual statistics (this publication) relate to the revenue figures that appear in the Devolved Taxes Account in Revenue Scotland’s Annual Report and Financial Statements (referred to in this annex as the Annual Report). The figures in the statistics and Annual Report are produced on a different basis.
Appendix B (i) - comparison of LBTT statistics with published accounts
Revenue Scotland’s monthly LBTT statistics and the data in this publication are based on the date the LBTT return is submitted to Revenue Scotland. Generally this is different from the effective date (generally the data that a land transaction is completed) as taxpayers have 30 days from the effective date to submit their LBTT return. It can take up to eight weeks from the effective date for the majority (99%) of LBTT returns to be submitted, whereas no such time lag exists for data produced by date of submission.
Scottish Landfill Tax (SLfT) is a tax on the disposal of waste to a landfill in Scotland, whether to an authorised landfill site or not. SLfT applies to all taxable disposals made in Scotland on or after 1 April 2015.
Table 12: Declared taxable disposals by SLfT rate and year