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Home Forums Patrick Cannon When will courts take a purposive approach to the SDLT legislation? Reply To: When will courts take a purposive approach to the SDLT legislation?

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Patrick
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You may be thinking of Gripple. As you suggest support for the view that SDLT is not subject to a strong purposive approach can be found in Gripple v HMRC [2010] EWHC 1609 (Ch) where although it wasn’t an SDLT case, Henderson J. said:
?The schedule runs to 26 paragraphs and occupies ten pages in Tolley?s Yellow Tax Handbook for 2005-2006. I emphasise this point because one of Mr. Gordon?s submissions for Gripple is that the schedule evinces a general intention to provide enhanced relief for expenditure on R&D, and that a generous construction should where possible be adopted in order to further that general aim. I am unable to accept this submission. It seems to me, on the contrary, that a detailed and prescriptive code of this nature leaves little room for a purposive construction, and there is no substitute for going through the detailed conditions, one by one, to see if, on a fair reading, they are satisfied.?
SDLT is clearly a ?detailed and prescriptive code? and it is therefore reasonable to think the application of the Ramsay approach is constrained by this fact in its application to SDLT.
This was a surprising line of argument from HMRC and although Keith Gordon (for the taxpayer) was shot down heroically in this case his sacrifice may not have been in vain when one considers the wider implications of Mr Justice Henderson’s insightful decision. One wonders however if the honourable judge was smiling to himself as he sided with HMRC.