Following some helpful advice on here recently (thank you Mumblechum!) I thought I'd see if there was anything people could do to help with another topic. Hopefully this will make sense...
I'm very lucky that my Mum and Dad being farmers have a pretty large garden and after a conversation sometime ago about the idea of self building they offered us the part of their garden that used to be their kitchen garden. It had been allowed to go to seed and was very overgrown due to them no longer being able to physically manage to grow their own veg. It was such an amazing thing for them to do for us as there is no way we'd be able to afford to buy the same house in the same area and so we set about selling our house and finding an architect and getting some (totally non grand designs!) plans drawn up.
Planning permission was put in for (needed to be full PP as we're in a conservation area) and at the time for ease the application was put in DM's name.
We hit a few stumbling blocks but the permission came through nearly 18 months later :)
My parents until recently had to stay down as the landowners (in order for us to avoid huge amounts - over 38k - of Section 106 commuted sum payment for affordable housing/developer contributions) but towards the end of last year the ties we needed to keep away from developer contributions etc were lifted as some clause to do with rural development means they don't apply to our application anymore.
Mum and Dad are quite happy to sign the land over to us (it will make the self build mortgage application process a lot easier for one thing as well as meaning we wouldn't need to burden them with anything to do with the financial side of things) but despite them having a chat with their solicitor - this was pre the removal of developer contributions that meant a 7 year tie to the land for them so things were a bit more complicated - we are all still very unsure how we go about having the land signed over without them incurring a large amount of capital gains tax. From our reading we're not sure whether gifting the land would mean they were still hit by a big bill.
Anyone have any ideas? Or thinking outside of the box another way to enable us to build/sort our finances separately from my parents?
For instance we've all been wondering about leasehold and whether that would be an option (but then we don't really understand enough about it, whether it is even possible or what would happen in the future - whether we'd be able to buy the lease off them for say a nominal amount or even if we'd be able to get a self-build mortgage on land we would only lease!)
Everything has been on hold for so long while we waited for the planning permission that now it's here we still can't get started on much as we don't know what to do with the land situation. Any advice very gratefully received.