Schedule 18 - Relief for community amateur sports clubs
Finance Bill
10:30 am
Mr Howard Flight (Arundel and South Downs, Conservative)
Good morning, Mr. Benton. I welcome you back to chairing our deliberations. I must apologise to the Committee because I must go and speak in the financial services debate at 11 o'clock. I hope that we shall have completed schedule 18 by that time, but if not my hon. Friends will take over.
I hope that there is a chance of a stand part debate, because I recollect that when we were debating clause 57 before the holiday we had discussed its principle but had not wound up the subject. Amendments Nos. 69 and 70 are specific and seek to extend eligibility for the new relief to additional types of club. We want to stress the major point that the new relief is unnecessarily complex and restrictive. It would have been better to give qualifying sports clubs the same tax relief measures as those enjoyed by charities. The Law Society says that the relief is welcome, but that it will add to, rather than replace, existing tax reliefs. The relief will therefore add to the complexity of existing reliefs, and that could have been avoided by bringing all sports clubs under a single regime, which is something that we sought to redress with new clause 3.
I shall divert to apologise for having initially omitted to welcome the hon. Member for Wentworth (John Healey) to his new post of Economic Secretary to the Treasury, and I congratulate him on that. We share views about the importance of skills training and have spoken together about that.
The Law Society also comments that it should be made clear that ''clubs'' extends to corporate bodies, provided they have complied with amateur requirements. Although the principles in paragraph 2 are laudable, the question is whether they will impose unforeseen constraints on the clubs concerned. It should be clear, for example, that a club does not cease
to be open to the whole community because it has rules allowing its members to be expelled for inappropriate or disruptive behaviour, so an addition to paragraph 2 should be made.
The reliefs for donors in paragraph 9(3) should extend to include relief for a club from stamp duty on any assets that it acquires. The provisions allowing gifts of assets to charities should also extend to sports clubs. Paragraph 14 contains the definition of an eligible sport, which will be designated by statutory instrument. It might have been easier to include a list of sports in the legislation. Given the adverse tax consequences that follow from a club ceasing either to be registered or to hold property for qualifying purposes, surely a list of eligible sports clubs could be laid out in statute to create certainty on the core list of activities that can be undertaken to give rise to the relevant tax reliefs. The two amendments are designed to address those issues.
One point has come to my attention since our previous discussions. The Treasury proposals last November contained a specific pledge to permit 80 per cent. rates relief to qualifying sports clubs. That seems to have disappeared and the promised relief is less generous than that suggested by the Government during the election campaign. I have received many complaints from sports clubs that the package is not what they had been led to believe. We believe that parity with charity is the correct approach. The costs would not be hugely material but the administration would be much easier.