So the rumours have proved to be correct, the Government plans to replace up to £195m of Innovate UK grants per annum with loans. The following statement comes from the BIS press release on their Spending Review Settlement: The government will introduce new finance products to support companies to innovate following best practice in [...]
As I discussed in this earlier post, HMRC announced on 28 October that it would be launching an Advance Assurance scheme for small businesses making their first R&D claim. Actually, the scheme was first announced by George Osborne in his 2014 Autumn Statement and included in the consultation document “Improving access to R&D tax credits [...]
HMRC launched their plans for improving access to R&D tax credits for small business on 28 October. To publicise the launch there were tweets (and retweets) from HMRC, HM Treasury and David Gauke (and probably others). The document - which is actually titled "Making R&D Easier: HMRC's plan for small business R&D tax relief" - [...]
As anyone familiar with R&D tax relief claims will know, one of the main items of qualifying expenditure included in most claims will be the company's relevant Staff Costs. Since the relief was first introduced in FA2000 it has been accepted that reimbursed expenses form part of Staff Costs. At least, that is my experience [...]
HMRC has just published the latest statistics on R&D tax relief claims for the 2013/14 year. I'm not proposing to try and analyse them in detail but there are a couple of interesting points that stand out for me. SME Claims Once again, it is SMEs that are leading the growth in the number of [...]
I attended the latest meeting of HMRC's R&D Consultative Committee (RDCC) yesterday. This proved to be a very useful meeting and my notes of the meeting can be downloaded here. Note: These are my own notes from the meeting. They have not been reviewed by any of the other attendees and do not represent an [...]
The Chancellor, George Osborne, delivered his first Budget of the new Parliament today. As well as being the first of this new Parliament, it was also the first Budget of a majority Conservative Government since November 1996. This is, of course, the second budget of 2015, the first having been delivered in March, before the [...]