You only have to see some of the recent announcements such as:

– Phasing out new Diesel and Petrol Cars by 2030

– Shell installing a network of 50,000 of accessible on-street and on forecourt EV charging points across the UK, through its recently acquired Ubitricity business.

– The Highways agency using Graphene in asphalt to enhance the durability of road surfaces and extending the periods of time between maintenance.

It’s the little things

We’ve been trying to work out how to make our tax consultancy more “Sustainable”, but its difficult, we work from a serviced office so have little impact on the choices of services. We come to work and travelled to our clients through a mixture of train and car, we could use cars less, but they are convenient, but we haven’t really been visiting clients since lockdown ceased. Instead, we have made use of services like Zoom and MS Teams to keep interacting with our customers, so perhaps in a way, we have stumbled into being slightly more sustainable.

We will continue this into the future and mix in a handful of client visits as we move forward. It’s difficult not being on a client’s premises, certainly when it comes to the engineering and manufacturing sectors that we support with Research and Development Tax Credit claims.

Being on site gives you a feel for what’s going on, especially if you have a curious nature, which we tend to have, because of what we do. When we ask questions based on what we see, hear and feel, generally speaking the potential to claim and also the value of the claim increases.

Sustainability doesn’t have to be expensive.  It doesn’t have to be huge grand gestures, it will be the sum of all of the little changes that we make in both our personal lives and in business that will be greater than the whole.

The bigger projects can get support

However, if you are looking for that one big project, that world beating new piece of technology, or an idea to revolutionise the agricultural industry or the renewables industry, or to reduce waste, then it might be expensive, it might be time consuming, but there are plenty of ways that you can find support from government.

There are a number of competitive grant schemes that have sustainable elements at their core, you only have to check out UK Research and Innovation  (www.ukri.org) where there are over 100 opportunities for business funding, granted not all of them are focused on sustainability but there will be a significant number.

Then there’s research and development tax relief. If you are lucky enough to have successfully received a grant, you may be somewhat surprised to hear that you could also benefit from tax relief for spending the grant money. You can claim under the RDEC scheme, whether you are a large company or an SME for the grant funded projects, which for money spent since 1 April 2020 will generate either a tax rebate or a cash injection of up to 10.53% of the eligible costs.

If you are a small company and you either didn’t apply for a grant or weren’t successful in your application, but have decided to go it alone regardless then you could in fact be in line for an even greater cash injection for a loss making company of up to 33.35% of your eligible spend, if you are profitable it will reduce your tax liability by up to 24.7% of the eligible spend.

The last way the government can help is through Patent Box. If your new product is so ground-breaking that you are looking to Patent it and are successful in being granted a patent, you could reduce your tax bill further, because of the profits being generated on the sale of the items being taxed at a reduced rate of 10%.

As we move towards the end of 2021 and in to 2022, we can help you with all of these aspects of funding for innovation, as we have grown our business relationships to include an innovation grants funding expert to our existing family of services, which already focus on R&D and Patent Box.

In the meantime, one of the things that we have already been doing is offering a reduction in our fees for companies that are developing green technology, sustainable agriculture and renewables. We’ve worked with a few companies this year and are looking to find and support more businesses that are working in these high value areas that will help all of us to be a little more sustainable in our lives.

If you would like to have a chat to determine whether you have an eligible project, sustainable or not then you can book a 15 minute call with our director, Simon Bulteel. Get in touch today.

The post Can you make innovation in sustainability financially viable in the short term? appeared first on Cooden Tax Consulting.

Tensei think it is ‘Smart to use what is wasted and not waste what is precious’.

This nugget of a company was founded by Annabelle Cox, previously co-founder of SCIN, the UK’s largest materials library and resource based in London, Clerkenwell.  Curiosity and Systemic Design has fuelled her relationship with business.  Early 2013 and on the back of an exhibition at SCIN showcasing materials development inspired by the farm, she realised that there was potentially an opportunity to create technical materials, notably papers, from straw.  Historically, straw has been used in Indo-China as a substitute for wood pulp. Adoption in the West though is another story and for good reason, there was plenty of forestry.

Fast forward to 2016 and change rides wildly into town as the perfect storm of shifting societal habits, resource constraint, climate change and plastic ‘non gratis’ colluded to Tensei’s benefit. We needed and need to look to pastures new and ironically, some answers lie in the field.

So why was this so interesting for Tensei? In a nutshell, Tensei researches, develops, and produces smart and or useful pulps, materials and products using biological systems, notably crop waste, biowaste and grasses.

This may sound simple and to an extent it is but the ‘to do’ list to make change happen for comfortable global adoption of these fibres is extensive: consistency, quality, supply, accreditation are some of the interesting headers.

Whilst Tensei are working hard to supply some of the answers, in part through a new technology platform to deliver on those requirements for adoption, they appreciate that for any innovation to succeed, it needs to work within current operating systems first before it can stretch its legs. Tensei’s approach therefore is to gently tickle Industry into making the change. For example, Tensei specifically work using commercially available pulps at this stage – wheat, bagasse, hemp, jute, bamboo, rice straw, cotton linters, flax but in the future, this will extend to a broader base of fibre from multiple bio waste streams.

To put it into greater context, the paper and board pulp market is currently about 431million tonnes of which non-wood is roughly 3% of the market – 12 million tonnes. ( source FAO)  Yet there is roughly 2.5 billion tonnes of uncollected straw estimated to be available.

A scalable, financially profitable business is of course important but the endemic spirit driving this is the need for the global economy to see the opportunity afforded by this raw material source. It is yet to become the ‘Go to’ material of choice but it waits quietly in the wings. Tensei is one of the drivers towards mainstream adoption of straw or crop waste as a viable, albeit different, resource for multiple industries from packaging to bio composites, textiles to chemicals.

Tensei is diaphanous:  part synthetic biology, part tech and full on environmental in its positioning as a company and ethos.

It sits between ‘Impactful’ and tech. Almost like a person yearning for mindfulness but with formula 1 elbow tweaking.  Like many emerging companies, Tensei is part of the global bioeconomy and according to Forbes:

“The global bioeconomy is about to take off as manufacturers choose biology as the method of choice to efficiently produce high-performance, sustainable products. Synthetic biology is at leading edge of this $4 trillion gold rush”

Part of Tensei’s offering is product based, this helps it to embark on its own R&D projects and demonstrate how it can also commercialise innovation for its customers. To date, Tensei has developed its own papers for food and drink: absorbent papers for uses ranging from pads in soft fruit punnets, bakery and in the future meat, fish and poultry, takeaways. and new recyclable coated laminate papers for a range of products from straws to crisp bags.

So, for those that want to future proof and deliver a genuinely impactful set of product solutions Tensei would love to help solve problems ranging from alternative solutions to plastic to what to do to valorise biowaste. The crop harvest is no longer just about food, it may even one day form part of a satellite construct orbiting earth. For more information on Tensei, visit www.tensei.co.uk.

Tensei have so far been able to claim around £30k for their historic R&D efforts and we are currently preparing claims for more, which will no doubt be used to fund future R&D that this innovative business, with an alternative idea, still has to undertake to widen their product portfolio.

Arrange a “Find Out in Fifteen” discovery session to determine your eligibility to claim. Book a call now!

The post Hello world – meet Tensei appeared first on Cooden Tax Consulting.

As we have started the new year with encouraging news about vaccines and hopefully a more positive outlook on the year ahead than perhaps we might have had six months ago, when many business owners thoughts were more focused on survival, it’s important to refocus on those sustainability goals that many businesses have.

We’ve been trying to work out how to make our tax consultancy more “Sustainable”, but its difficult, we work from a serviced office so have little impact on the choices of services. We come to work and travelled to our clients through a mixture of train and car, we could use cars less, but they are convenient but haven’t done so since lockdown. Since the onset of the first lockdown we have made use of services like Zoom and MS Teams to keep interacting with our customers.

So perhaps in a way, we have stumbled into being slightly more sustainable, will we maintain this as we come out of the other side of Covid? Who knows? It’s difficult not being on a client’s premises, certainly when it comes to the engineering and manufacturing sectors that we support with Research and Development Tax Credit claims, being on site gives you a feel for what’s going on, especially if you have a curious nature which we tend to have, because of what we do. When we ask questions based on what we see, hear and feel, generally speaking the potential to claim increases.

Sustainability doesn’t have to be expensive, it doesn’t have to be huge grand gestures, it will be the sum of all of the little changes that we make in both our personal lives and in business that will be greater than the whole.

That being said, if in business you are looking for that one big project, that world beating new piece of technology, or an idea to revolutionise the agricultural industry or the renewables industry, or to reduce waste, then it might be expensive, it might be time consuming, but there are plenty of ways that you can find support from government.

Business funding opportunities

There are a number of competitive grant schemes that have these sustainable elements at the core, you only have to check out UK Research and Innovation  (www.ukri.org) where there are over 100 opportunities for business funding. Granted not all of them are focused on sustainability but there will be a significant number, particularly with the advent of the government’s Industrial Strategy and its continuing signals that in the new post-Brexit world, we won’t be left behind when it comes to research and innovation.

Then there’s research and development tax relief. If you are lucky enough to have successfully received a grant, you may be somewhat surprised to hear that you could also benefit from tax relief for spending the money that you have received from the grant. You can claim under the RDEC scheme, whether you are a large company or an SME for the grant-funded projects, which for money spent since 1 April 2020 will generate either a tax rebate of up to 10.53% of the eligible costs or in the event you are loss-making a cash injection of the same 10.53%, so in a way you are having your cake and eating it.

If you are a small company and you either didn’t apply for a grant or weren’t successful in your application, but have decided to go it alone regardless then you could in fact be in line for an even greater cash injection for a loss making company of up to 33.35% of your eligible spend, if you are profitable it will reduce your tax liability by up to 24.7% of the eligible spend.

The last way the government can help is through Patent Box. If your new product is so ground breaking that you are looking to Patent it and are successful in being granted a patent, you could reduce your tax bill further, as a result of the profits being generated on the sale of the items being taxed at a reduced rate of 10%.

How Cooden can help

As we move forward in 2021, our goal is to be able to help you with all of these aspects of funding for innovation, as we look to grow our business by incorporating a business grants element to our existing family of services, which already focus on R&D and Patent Box.

In the meantime, one of the things that we have been doing is offering a reduction in our fees for companies that are developing green technology, sustainable agriculture and renewables. We’ve worked with a few companies this year and are looking to find and support more businesses that are working in these high value areas that will help all of us to be a little more sustainable in our lives. If you would like to have a chat to determine whether you have an eligible project, sustainable or not then you can book a 15 minute call with our director, Simon Bulteel.

Ultimately it feels like a lot of us accidentally became more sustainable as a result of Covid, but in spite of this, it will be great to put 2020 behind us and make the most of our new discoveries and get back to making good on our original sustainability goals as we grow into 2021.

The post Did sustainability take a back seat to survival in 2020? appeared first on Cooden Tax Consulting.

Enterprise Nation are celebrating Britain’s hard-working small business advisers with their Top 50 Advisers Competition. Our Managing Director, Simon Bulteel, has been named as an Enterprise Nation Top 50 Adviser and now we need your vote to help us win the Finance and Funding Category.

Lend Simon your vote and help us win!

Simon has supported numerous small business owners with their Research and Development Tax Relief claims over the years and has been on hand for businesses in need of Tax Enquiry Support and claim reviews.

Simon recently delivered talks on his areas of expertise at The Business Show held at Olympia London, which drew in crowds of business owners.

Helping business owners identify their ability to claim Research and Development Tax Relief claim has been a passion of Simon’s since he began Cooden Tax Consulting in 2013. Through TheBestOf Eastbourne #AskTheExpert event and other mediums such as Tech Hub’s Office Hours, Simon has given small business owners his expert advice and helped to raise awareness of the claims available to them under the Research and Development Tax Relief Scheme.

Thank you for taking the time to read this blog, and for lending Cooden Tax Consulting your vote!

Where do I vote?

Simply visit the Enterprise Nation website via this link: https://enterprisenation.typeform.com/to/A8sOlJ and register your vote for Simon Bulteel of Cooden Tax Consulting for the Top 50 Adviser 2018 awards.

Want to find out if your business is eligible to make a Research and Development Tax Relief Claim? Give us a call today on  01424 225345 to find out more about your business’ eligibility for a claim.

The post We need your vote! appeared first on Cooden Tax Consulting.

So we have already looked at FinTech as a relatively new phrase that has been used to describe a variety of businesses that are disrupting the payments market place and other areas of our financial lives. We briefly covered Bitcoin (the payment preference for Ransomware) and Blockchain which leads very nicely on to our second Tech phrase, RegTech.

What is RegTech?

RegTech refers to the introduction of software often, but not necessarily connected to developments in the financial sector, that helps manage compliance with any legal or regulatory structures or policies. It will be fundamental in areas like Anti-Money Laundering, so will have to work hand in hand with Blockchain transactions to identify the source of the Bitcoin in someone’s wallet, to make sure that the funds haven’t been laundered.

There are different areas that businesses can focus on when developing systems to manage compliance. Last autumn the Financial Times highlighted projects looking at such diverse potential applications as Analysing Data on capital and liquidity for use in reports to regulators; Scenario analysis and forecasting; Customer Identity and, perhaps in response to all the furore surrounding this in recent years… monitoring the conduct of Fund Managers choice of investments.

In the same article, it was reported that “The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority has plans to increase direct collaboration with RegTech companies to bring together market participants to work on shared challenges, and act as a catalyst for change”

Both FinTech and RegTech are species of technological advancement that have the potential to make the way we pay for everyday things, as well as our larger financial commitments such as mortgages, loans, pensions and investments easier to control, more consistently managed and properly scrutinised.

Can Cooden Tax Consulting help you with your RegTech or FinTech project?

We are already working with several businesses in these high-tech areas and have the expertise to help you identify the technological challenges that you may have been working through to deliver your own RegTech or FinTech project.

It is trying to overcome these technological challenges that are the cornerstone to accessing R&D Tax Credits to reward your business for your innovation.

In order to start considering a claim, you have to be far less tech savvy, you can pick up the phone on call Simon on 01424 225345 or use the contact form on the website and drop us a quick note and we’ll give you a call back.

The post Have you come across RegTech? appeared first on Cooden Tax Consulting.

According to a Wikipedia, the term Insurtech refers to innovations in technology that “squeeze out savings and efficiency from the current insurance industry model”, making it sound something a little like a superannuated offspring of the union of Fintech and RegTech, which is perhaps not an entirely inappropriate way of looking at it.

With a focus on UK start-ups entering this field, a further examination of some Insurance companies seeking to exploit the opportunities offered by technological advances under the InsurTech umbrella is provided in Jonathan Swift’s article for Insurance Post from earlier this year (*2).

That opportunities for UK businesses already involved in or considering research and development in this area continue to grow is supported by Business Insider UK’s report from April 27th this year, entitled “UK still attractive for Insurtech” (*3)

What is Sporttech?

Sporttech which will, if you use it to search Google for a definition, commonly provide hits for a large gaming company, who use this as a brand name, also refers to technological innovation in Sport that assists human beings to play sports faster or better or more fairly.

A good example is the Hawkeye technology, developed initially for LBW decisions in cricket and now significantly adapted to be commonly in use in ATP tennis competitions like Wimbledon – though not at Roland Garros in Paris, where the Umpire continues to descend from his chair to address any disputed call; pointing out the mark in the clay and either offering a flattened downward facing palm (the ball was in) or an upturned, wafted and somewhat nonchalant palm (the ball was out).

This is worth noting as during The 2017 TV coverage of the French Open BBC commentators did have access to Hawkeye which demonstrated that nine times out of ten the Umpire got it right. However, that one wrong decision could always be crucial.

Therein of course – and applicable to all these technological innovations, is revealed the holy grail of R&D in the Tech field – consistency and reliability that offers an improved experience for both the user and/or the customer.

Call 01424 225345 and ask for Simon, or just visit the Contact Us page on our website and Simon will give you a call back.

Read more about our services.

The post Are you an Insurtech or Sporttech Business ? You could be eligible for a Research & Development Tax Relief claim! appeared first on Cooden Tax Consulting.

The fundamentals of FinTech

FinTech is a phrase referring to computer programmes and other technology supporting, streamlining and improving functionality and ease of use for businesses and their customers in the financial and banking sector.

The development of mobile phone payments and the platforms that support and process transactions via mobile phone and those addressing the online security of such activity would fall under the Fintech umbrella, as would the now everyday availability of chip and pin or, to come more up to date, contactless card payments.

Going further than this, legacy banks are now looking into ways of bringing cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, still potentially the domain of the Cyber Criminal and their Ransomware attacks, into mainstream banking.

Blockchain is another phrase that you will be hearing when it comes to banking and insurance, blockchain is distributed database to track digital assets such as Bitcoin, but has the potential to go much further.

How we help Fintech companies

We’re already working with a number of businesses in the FinTech space, so we know the challenges you’re probably facing in developing your solutions.

Trying to overcome those challenges is the basis of a claim for Research and Development Tax Relief, failing to overcome them, will actually be very useful when it comes to a claim, and may help recoup some of the losses invested in your project.

Why not have a chat with one of our experts to see whether your FinTech project is sitting on a little pot of gold?

Call 01424 225345 and ask for Simon, or just visit the Contact Us page on our website and Simon will give you a call back.

The post The new language of the technological age appeared first on Cooden Tax Consulting.

Brighton: A Sussex City developing creative & tech businesses

The South-East coast of England has proven to attract businesses within the creative sector over the last few years, to the point where Brighton has ranked 6^th highest in the UK for number of creative businesses in the Travel to Work Area (TTWA).

Industrial clustering occurs when many companies from a certain sector locate to the same place. This generates a networking ground for where these companies can easily share information and institutions can support the growth of the industry in that location. This can be enormously beneficial to the region as it can generate new jobs through the injection of a variety of workers with differing skillsets.

As previously mentioned, Brighton’s entrepreneurship is flourishing, particularly in the creative tech sectors such as digital design and gaming.  Brighton was listed in the Centre for Cities 2015 Outlook as having the highest number of start-ups per capita outside of London with many of these being tech-related.  Brighton’s perfect blend of the creative with the digital has generated an air of confidence from innovative entrepreneurs in the area that are willing to take new risks and persevere to establish truly unique and competitive businesses.

There is a true sense of community within the creative tech sector in Brighton with local businesses collaborating with one another as well as working closely with local universities, giving the region a strong competitive edge.

Same sector enterprises that collect in the same geographical location quickly begin to see the perks of operating in the same location for networking when they establish informal business relations through social networking. More importantly these businesses begin to reap these benefits when they establish more formal relationships through supplying and buying from one another and collaborating on Research and Development (R&D) projects.

Research and Development plays an instrumental role in the success of many businesses, particularly those within the creative sector.  Huge amounts of money go unclaimed by businesses every year either through missing opportunities to claim, or underclaims for R&D Tax Relief. R&D Tax Relief exists to encourage businesses to invest in R&D spending with the aim of supporting a company’s investment in innovation.  If a company is liable for Corporation Tax, they could be claiming the Tax Relief which will significantly reduce their tax bill by a percentage of their allowable R&D expenditure. If, however their innovation spend has created a tax loss, the company can surrender the losses arising from their R&D Spend for an R&D Tax Credit. The Tax Credit is given in the form of cash by HM Revenue & Customs, fancy that.

Contact our team of Research and Development Tax Relief specialists today and see how much Cooden Tax Consulting could be saving your company in R&D tax relief.

The post Research & Development Tax Relief & Creative Tech businesses appeared first on Cooden Tax Consulting.

Cooking is big business and assisting market innovators to achieve better results can bring tangible rewards.

Dozens of skilled chefs, restauranteurs, food critics and some ex-contestants; all deemed to possess enhanced knowledge of the subject of fine dining, are contracted temporarily to the BBC for each season of MasterChef. These experts pool their knowledge together to help develop new talent, with amateur cooks emerging from the process better equipped to deliver a consistently high quality product, tailored to best address the tastes and needs of today’s marketplace.

Last year the hot new development was cooking fish in a water bath; this year its decorating the plate with sauce splashed like raindrops around the fish, meat or veg. It all gets tested, on Messrs Torode and Wallace and on a variety of other unsuspecting guinea pigs nationwide. The testing is a crucial part of the development process.

Our basic need: to eat, never changed, but the raw ingredients get tried and tested in new combinations, (marmalade on fish), and the delivery of the food on the plate demands new approaches. Slowly but surely, the best of the contestants adapt and improve; engineering their dishes to perfection through research and development; determined to deliver a better meal, quite literally, for today’s consumers.

What do the experts get in return? They obtain extra credit for their contribution, whether that be via an increase in clientele, further media opportunities or an enhanced reputation in the industry; all of which, supported by the provision of a cash injection, enable them to further progress their own careers or grow their own businesses.

Subcontracted Research and Development work in the Technology Sector may attract an R&D Expenditure Credit (RDEC.)

When considering sub contracted work, a parallel can be drawn in business terms when we look at small scale specialist companies in the technology sector, providing their expertise to larger businesses and developing new processes to modernise, streamline and improve their clients offering to the public.

There are many different categories of application that HMRC have established that pertain to different types of R&D Tax Relief. To define subcontracted work, where it may be possible to submit an application for Tax Relief under RDEC, online guidance from HMRC specifies the following*:

“Where one company engages another company to carry out R&D activity on the first company’s behalf in exchange for payment, with the first company having rights to the intellectual property resulting from the R&D then that is subcontracting of the R&D to the second company.”

It is the smaller company’s expertise that the larger client is tapping in to and, not infrequently, economies of scale, close knit collaborative working and the high quality thinking, that are the hallmarks of many UK SME’s, encourage larger players to ask those experts to pitch in and find the best solutions for the challenges of the 21^st Century.

A Masterclass from the Master Chefs of the Technology Kitchen

Cooden Tax Consulting has recently assisted just such a business to make an application under RDEC, following work carried out in the financial sector to update online processes to help larger financial institutions comply with regulatory demands in areas such as Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Know Your Client (KYC) and Customer Due Diligence (CDD).

Banks can find themselves receiving hefty fines if they fail to adequately identify their clients and those client’s sources of income. In today’s market of course, that needs to be done in a timely fashion and can sometimes involve both the migration of data from older records and/ or the amalgamation of a bank’s current internet platforms with more efficient technology, better attuned to cope with the regulatory demands of the new age.

Researching the best way to do that and developing the most efficient solutions is what ICON do. They are the specialist chefs helping the banks to deliver five star menus and a first class service.

A brief resume of the work undertaken: ICON developed an online process with, importantly, a global application, to assist one of its clients who had been under significant regulatory pressure to implement new and improved Customer Due Diligence (CDD) measures, with failure – on the bank’s part – having quite severe consequences. It was identified part way through the development process that the project would be very difficult to scale into the global solution that the financial services firm truly required. Our client, ICON, was called on to deliver a proof of concept that could provide the robustness in delivering the regulator’s requirements and is now developing the architecture and question based scenarios to be able to deliver a completed project in 6 months compared to the envisaged 2 to 3 years, based on the original specification. The solution will allow the same question-based data set to be applied to the most basic of customers and to the most complicated.

The post Do you Subcontract out your expertise to help others improve their offering? You do. What do you get back for that? appeared first on Cooden Tax Consulting.

While voices on both sides of the forthcoming EU Referendum on June 23^rd tend to market their cause to us all in fairly bold and strident terms, clearly very determined to convince us that their argument is the winning one, does anyone truly fully understand, whether we stay or go, what the repercussions for the UK’s Small Businesses might be?

Well, without wishing to cause offence to the Danes, to paraphrase one of their more famous marketing slogans: Probably not.

Seeking Clarity from the Confusion

Key word research for this article pinpointed the dilemma that many undecided voters in the UK might be facing over the referendum.

If you search single words, such as Brexit or look for monthly hits on the names of principle players in the debate, such as David Cameron, Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage, there appears to be a substantial amount of interest. However, those words don’t help us to identify what research or questions people might be asking, they merely identify an interest, (quite possibly, in the latter cases, not related to Brexit) we might reasonably have guessed at.

If you search for results for questions, such as “What is Brexit or “When is the EU referendum” a shockingly low amount of interest is indicated by the figures revealed. Try almost any other combination of relevant words and the results simply get more and more disappointing, almost as if people aren’t that interested at all.

It’s hard to be conclusive, but could it be that, possibly resultant from the blood and guts style battle going on between the two factions, with seemingly very little real concern about what the effect on the people of the UK might be, that the biggest civilian casualty in this war of words is continuing wide scale ignorance?

Do those in power really care about that – probably not.

A few pointers then…

The suggested short term threat of loss of jobs and loss of financial support for small businesses, following Brexit, is a key area of interest at Cooden Tax Consulting.

We offer advice to small businesses on how they may recoup costs, where expenditure can be shown to have been occasioned on Research and Development Projects and, as per recent articles on Micro-brewing and the effects on the soft drinks industry as a result of Mr Osbornes Sugar Tax, we seek to offer precise and salient advice that is relevant and will matter to entrepreneurs all across the UK.

Fact 1: A lot of the cash that is made available currently through R & D Tax Relief payments for innovation and exploration in industry and business ventures comes from the EU.

If you want to better understand the nature of Research and Development here, how the UK distributes this money and what the measurement of the value of Research and Development is in terms of the UK’s wider economy you could make a good start reading the 350 plus pages of the following document:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/368808/bis-14-1179-united-kingdom-partnership-agreement-part-one.pdf

You would then be a lot better informed, but in presenting that option, understandably: a lot is being asked of the average man in the street, or indeed, of any small business owner, who will probably have more than enough on his plate keeping his business afloat and profitable.

Fact 2: Soundbites, which this article is deliberately not offering, are taken from publications such as that above and referral constantly made to other literature from various think-tanks, some more respected than others, in an effort to convince businesses to vote in or out at the referendum. Does referral to these massively complicated publications really help us? Or do we sigh deeply and prefer , feeling bamboozled and uncertain, to order another round, maybe of Carlsberg, maybe not – to soften the blows.

Fact 3: Cooden Tax Consulting has gained an in depth understanding of the detail because, as bedtime reading, to aid a restful night’s slumber, we have explored the nitty-gritty of such papers. Having done so, we are able to offer guidance to Small Businesses as specialists, with detailed knowledge of Research and Development Tax Relief. We can advise you, having looked at your particular project and identified the correct route for you to pursue an application for relief, whether or not the cash you hope to get back will come from the EU pot and whether, should we leave that institution, it is likely to still be available in the future.

You may, quite legitimately, ask how?

In the absence of a Crystal Ball, we have to apply some Common Sense

The one valuable and overwhelming message that shines from the pages of the document at the above link, is that funding research and development properly is a core element in building a strong economy.

It’s also true that the UK has a good reputation globally for undertaking new research and delivering innovative ideas for industry and business.

Consequently, were we to leave the EU and find ourselves a smaller fish in a bigger global pond, there is good reason to believe that the UK Government, of whatever political persuasion, would want to continue to fund R & D Tax Relief to the best of its ability.

That of course sets afloat a raft of questions about where the money would come from and who the potential winners and losers in the new economic landscape might be.

Pro campaigners will very likely tell you that the uncertainty is reason enough to stay in the EU. Voices urging us to leave might argue that our proven skillset in the world of R&D will offer us huge new opportunities to lead the world, free from the shackles of EU legislation and restrictions.

In short, it seems unlikely that R&D Tax Relief programmes would disappear following the vote on June 23^rd. However, just as it is becoming impossible to predict the result, in truth, it’s also impossible to say exactly how either outcome will affect R & D for small businesses.

Does that help you decide – probably not? If you want to be better informed you will have to take time to delve in to the detail.

However, Cooden Tax Consulting is here and will remain here, (as Sussex hasn’t yet launched its campaign for independence) to guide you to a better understanding of what you might be able to recoup. In so doing, we’ll help businesses, all across the UK, to continue to prosper.

The post BREXIT – Should we? Does anyone really know? appeared first on Cooden Tax Consulting.