The Cross-Border Trade Bill

The Taxation (Cross-Border Trade) Bill was introduced in Parliament on 20 November 2017. The purpose of the Bill is to ensure that, post-Brexit, the UK has a functioning import duty, excise duty and VAT regime, so that the tax treatment of cross-border trade both with EU and non-EU countries reflects the eventual outcome of the continuing Brexit negotiations. The problem, of course, is that no-one knows what that outcome will be. The Bill therefore tries to accommodate all plausible outcomes, from a ‘hard’ Brexit to a Brexit of varying degrees of ‘softness’, leaving it to the government to decide, nearer the time, which provisions of the Bill should be brought into force and which should be dropped.

This article was first published in the 2 February 2018 edition of the Tax Journal.