Scottish (and English) businesses are missing out on R&D tax relief

Every year, we usually head north from our base in Norwich to the delightful cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh on client meetings. If you know the transport network of East Anglia, you’ll be fully aware of what a mammoth operation this is as road and rail connections are, to put it politely, not up to other county standards.

Now get us wrong, we like being based in Norfolk and London is under 2 hours away, but Scotland is always a big undertaking.

Now you didn’t presumably click this post to work out how far Norwich is away from Edinburgh? But in case you did, it’s 373 miles or a drive of 7 hours 5 minutes or 6 hours plus via train.

No, the purpose of this latest post is to show how Scottish SMEs (with some of their English counterparts) are missing out on R&D tax relief:

According to government figures published in October 2019, only 48,635 R&D tax credit claims were made across the country in 2017-2018, of which just 2,195 were from Scotland.

Those figures from late last year may or may not surprise you. Scotland is of course smaller in terms of geography and population but would you have anticipated 46,000 claims from English businesses and just over 2,ooo from north of Hadrian’s Wall?

We didn’t.

In monetary terms, just £155 million was claimed in Scotland, as opposed to £1.1 billion for the entire UK.

All businesses, whether in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland or Wales, need to take every opportunity to claim Research and Development Tax Relief.

In these strange Covid 19 times, where cashflow issues are particularly problematic, you, as a business, need to maximise help.