What on earth is this nonsense?
Exactly which weighty problem will the Advocate General of the European Court of Justice be wrestling with next, you may well ask? The legal implications of admitting former communist states to the EU? Putting a legal firewall around Europe to stem the tide of would-be immigrants from around the planet? Making peace between the feuding Gibraltar Brits and Spain?
Not a bit of it. The Advocate General will be deciding whether or not pub fag-machines with wheels are occupying land. The highest court in the UK, the House of Lords, wants to know. It also needs to know whether the decision will affect other machines like video games and one-arm bandits.
"It all seems to hang on whether you can move them around or not," says Paul de Beresford, a partner and VAT expert at national accountancy group Hacker Young. "It's complicated. At present the machine owners pay ‘rent' to the pub. Rent is often VAT exempt. The question is whether this rent is exempt from VAT or not. If it's not, is it sales commission? And if so, because cigarettes are VATable, can the pub reclaim all its VAT.
"If the machines are fixed, the VAT incurred by the pub on items like furniture used by the smokers, drinkers and players alike, can't always be recovered in full.
"Because the publican can move machines with castors to the location he chooses, it's argued that they are not occupying land, so the ‘rent' isn't really rent and the pub's VAT is a cost element of the commission-based income and is therefore claimable.
"We're waiting the European Court of Justice's decision with bated breath," de Beresford observes. "It's hard to predict whether it's going to result in a gigantic upsurge in castor sales or not.
"Some might use this case as proof that the wheels are falling off the European Union! Have we really reached the point where we need half-a-dozen levels of international bureaucracy and months of legal debate to decided whether on not to put wheels on a fag machine?"
It is nice to know that the House of Lords is dealing with such weighty mattters on our behalf. If the machines do have castors perhaps they should be taxed like a car taking into account emissions and tar levels of the contents. Oh dear perhaps I have just given them another crazy idea for some more daft legislation.
