Author Archives: Katherine Lewis

Ideas to help Tourism for the UK

By Katherine Lewis | Fri 19th June 2020 - 6:31 pm

Each year every tourism business has to complete a tax return, to allow HMRC know how much profit it has made, and how much tax is due.

With COVID, we know that the back end of the tax year 2019-2020 March was virtually a write off, and since the beginning of the 2020-2021 tax year, trade has almost been non-existent.

Since COVID the UK Government has generously seen fit to support British businesses by furloughing staff at a rate of 80% of their gross pay. Although wage costs are a vast amount of the tourism trade’s costs, the premises costs are also sinking our existing tourism businesses.

But how do we help them, when there are so many restrictions on COVID induced health and safety which makes almost all tourism venues not only unprofitable but barely able to break even?

One suggestion might be to make tax return completion every 6 months whilst COVID is among us. Additionally, to make the losses available to previous year profits, therefore producing tax refunds. All that is happening is that we are speeding up the tax return process, in order to keep these businesses with additional cash to see them through. In order to allow 6 months’ tax returns and carry back losses it must be included in the Budget to make it law.

How would bi-annual tax returns help?