Lobby the Government to allow Outdoor Provider businesses to claim reduced VAT rate

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We have received the following message from Way2Go Adventures, suggesting that VAT-registered Providers contact the Federation of Small Businesses to help them lobby for a reduction in VAT rate due to the impact of Covid on our sector:

“This may be interest to SWOAPG members that are VAT registered and who fall into the Tourism sector.

“As it stands at the moment, after lots of research and enquiries to various people, we are not able to reduce our VAT down to 5% even though our income is heavily dependent on Tourists and our work is predominately March-September and last season we only traded from mid July – September really with the odd little bit after.

“The Federation of Small Businesses  are lobbying the Government to allow businesses like ours to be able to reduce the VAT. They asked us to write into them with some info about our business and the effect that Covid and restrictions are having on our business which I have done, and they have passed this on to their policy department.

“Other SWOAPG members might also wish to email FSB to increase the lobbying ‘power’ for our sector – the more people that write to FSB, the more evidence they will have to lobby the government in this matter.

Please see below a brief outline of the information to send. YOU DON’T NEED TO BE A MEMBER OF FSB to do this.

Send to: customerservices@fsb.org.uk
Mark it for the attention of the Policy Team.

Explain the effect of and the benefit of reducing VAT to 5% for businesses like ours.
Summarise the effects that COVID has had on your business, the fact that we are a tourism and leisure business in a tourists area, heavily dependant on tourism etc.
Describe a little about your business
Include things like little or no income during 2020, turning customers away due to having to work to ratios, instructor counting as 1 household therefore having a large impact on how many people per Instructor, etc.

Add the following: We would like to be included in the FSB government lobby for our type of business to be included in the VAT reduction and to have it back dated to when the VAT reduction first came into play in 2020.

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