Can anyone tell me why some people in the profession have started saying “business relief” when they would formerly have said “business property relief”?
I’d assumed perhaps the terminology had changed in the Inheritance Tax Act 1984 - but doing a “find” against its text I do not get any hits for either phrase. However “business property” gets 40 hits so superficially still seems to be the terminology.
It has always been “business property” in the legislation, therefore called business property relief. I believe somebody at HMRC just decided one day to start calling it business relief and it spread through the system and into the forms.
I would guess this happened about 3 years ago, I don’t think there was any formal announcement so it may not have even been deliberate…like when “letters of administration” temporarily became “letter of administration” because the person coding the probate service system didn’t realise it should be plural.
Thank you @andrew.goodman.
I’m going to stick to Business Property Relief then, and especially the abbreviation “BPR”. It may be a bit of a misnomer but at least it refers specifically to this and can’t be confused with all the other business related tax reliefs there are. And BR has far too many other things it could mean.