If labour win the election can they introduce VAT immediately?

[londonparent321]

(For school fees) Or do they need to go through the courts which could take years /never happen?

Children getting into selective private schools are by default intelligent.

They may not be more intelligent than kids from low income families, but they will have parents who are more than happy to invest in top flight tutors and preparation to ace the 11+.

Seems the HTs at grammars agree:

https://inews.co.uk/news/labour-private-school-tax-wealthy-poorer-children-grammars-2875633

It's an interesting question. My ds is about to take gcses. He'll start A'levels in Sept 24.

If Labour get in - say Jan 25 - they'll try to complete the process in time for Sept 25.

If that happens, the schools will offer a pre-payment option, allowing parents to take a loan or raid their pensions/saving and pay up-front, thus avoiding the first year of VAT. So anyone with dcs in year 11 now, will be able to avoid it.

@MandyMotherOfBrian Wrong. Local authorities are legally required to provide school places for children in their area. They have no choice.

So get ready for your dcs to be in class sizes of 40, where classroom provision is insufficient. Add in the Raac issues that LEAs are already battling with, and you see the problem.

It is a short-sighted, ill-considered policy at best. Like it or not, many parts of the country rely on private school capacity.

My understanding is that VAT will still fall due on pre paid fees. The service has not been delivered at the point of payment and so VAT cannot be avoided this way.

I am not an accountant, but it is worth looking into if you plan to do this.

It depends how the legislation is drawn up, but Labour have signalled that they intend to make it applicable to fees paid in advance.

Yes, to avoid VAT, payment will have to be made before anti-forestalling legislation is enacted. So fees paid the same day any Labour victory is announced would be beyond their VAT legislation.

Interesting times.

It's obvious they will do it straight away. It's seen as a big win for them 🤔.

My DC are older however if they were primary moving to secondary I would be taking a place at our green and leafy comp and saving the money for them in ISAs abs possibly tutoring if required. I think anyone with a reasonable and over subscribed comp near them would be mad not to take place as it'll be nigh on impossible to get a place afterwards. If I lived near a terrible comp, I would move to near a good/outstanding one.

I might also give up working full time (if I did) as I wouldn't have fees to pay out.

I wonder how this is going to pan out long term........

School places are carefully planned by professionals. Forecasts in place for the long term.

There are currently surplus state school places.
In my area we have a number of school closures and falling school roles (especially where the DfE have opened new free/academy schools).

‘The number of excess places in primary schools has doubled over 10 years to its highest level since records began, new government data published today shows. Secondary and primary school applications and offers statistics show that there were 130,776 excess primary school places recorded for the 2023-24 academic year.’ ( gov.uk)

And an earlier document.
https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-capacity

No, would need Parliament to pass it.
It could take years and never happen, like the Section 21, no fault eviction ban that has been kicked down the road for 5 years…

@MyGooseisTotallyLoose I'm really happy that hopefully children born to richer parents going forward won't have as easy a path to obtaining an advantage purely by luck of birth

Absolutely!

And if I was Phil Collins I'd be leaving the country. Plus, if my auntie had balls she'd be my uncle.

There's sooo much that they haven't thought through. Madness!

It’s a priority for Labour as far as I have heard. And rightly so.

This actually sounds like you believe parents who send their children to private school are doing the country a favour, purely out of the kindness of their heart.

Maybe the first one didn't go the way the OP wanted?

The only people who care about this are private school parents, who are in a minority. Everyone else can see it’s a totally fair and reasonable policy.

Most people who are ‘threatening’ to take their DCs out of private school and overwhelm the state sector, won’t actually do it. They’ll just pay the VAT.

The cost of private school fees has been a topic on these boards and elsewhere for a long long time, and hey the schools are still going.

Well I have heard that not only are they motivated by public service but also that all private school parents are at any point in time just 20% away from financial ruin, homelessness and prostitution, hence the destructive nature of this deeply Soviet proposal.

20% away from kicking out a dc with lower funds & motivation from a grammar more likely ;

That required primary legislation, VAT changes don't.

They do have to go through parliament but it is much faster and easier to schedule.

If they really wanted to, they could do it within a few months but most likely they would align it to a new academic year

Well we will see. At one point, the Labour Party voted to abolish private schools altogether. They abandoned that idea when they realised it wouldn’t work. Then they said they would definitely abolish charitable status of schools. They’ve now abandoned that policy as they realised it wouldn’t have the desired effect and want workable. So now we are onto proposal number 3 of how to harm private schools.

I’m interested how this VAT proposal fits in with Keir Starmer saying he has no interest in diverging from EU law, which the VAT on education proposal
apparently does.

@youmustrememberthis

No, of course not. But blithely assuming that the state sector can pick up the education of tens of thousands of extra children, who they do not know, at little notice and it not have any impact on the receiving schools is unrealistic.

Do you not think so?

It’s not unrealistic, it is a drop in the bucket of the hundreds of thousands of children already transferring between schools every year. Tens of thousands of these are immigrating in from foreign schools. I think they can handle a trickle of some well educated in the U.K. curriculum students from private into state schools.

Divergence from EU tax rules is an interesting point. If we were still in EU, the policy would be a non-starter.

Don't forget also, once you get to Sixth Form 20% are in private schools/colleges.

I also wonder whether council funded pupils at private SEN schools would be able to afford the extra 20%.

That makes zero sense though. Education inequality is not driven by the handful of kids who go private, it is driven by the gross underfunding of state education by successive governments and by the catchment area system which means that traps poor kids from poor areas in ofsted-failing, deprived and sometimes dangerous state schools and richer kids get to access state schools in affluent areas with classrooms full of other middle class uni-destined kids and well off parents who can fundraise staggering sums for school improvements.

How can you possibly worry about private schools and VAT (maybe the difference of 20k over the course of secondary school) when houses prices in the catchments for some of the country's best state schools run into the millions, and not just in London either.

You should recognise this policy for the disingenuous empty gesture it really is.

The only parents it will affect are the borderline ones making enormous sacrifices for their children already. The rich parents will not notice.

If Labour cared about inequality as much as they purport to they could raise income tax on high earners. I would love to see the French style supertax here. That would make a difference. This private school posturing will not.

I don’t know the process and it doesn’t really matter if it is full rigamorole or a streamlined one to get through Parliament.

I think VAT on private schools would be blocked 🚫 in Parliament much the same way as legislation that costs landlords money. Most MPs have a vested personal fiduciary interest in keeping their DCs’ school fees tax free as they did in being able to no fault evict their tenants (most MPs are landlords).

This VAT proposal by Labour is a vote getting gimmick, an election promise that will never be implemented.