Pressure HMRC on CGT when reinvesting?

For those of us who have held properties for a long period of time you are all probably aware that once upon a time there was a thing called ‘Taper Relief’ which year by year reduced your liability to CGT should you sell the property.

That relief was disposed of some years ago by HMRC. Now we have a regime where there are very few ways of reducing the CGT liability should you sell an investment property and the tax rate is high.

I dare say that there are others, like myself, who were considering selling a property (or properties) but have decided not to do so because of the punitive tax rates.

For myself I wanted to sell because I wanted to transfer my money into another type of property investment. It seems a ridiculous situation that there is no allowance made when you intend to reinvest the money (gains) in another property based business.

For some reason HMRC do not seem to view property letting in a business way!

Should we not pressure the HMRC to have some structure of allowances for people wishing to sell and then reinvest ?

Chris

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