Other cases that caught our eye: 3 September 2021

VAT exemption for insurance and insurance intermediary services

In Claims Advisory Group Ltd v HMRC [2021] UKUT 199 (TCC) (16 August 2021) the Upper Tribunal (UT) held that the service of claiming compensation for mis-sold payment protection insurance (PPI) was not exempt from VAT as it was neither an insurance transaction nor a service by an insurance agent that was related to insurance transactions. The cancellation of an insurance contract was not itself an insurance transaction for this purpose. The decision in this case was based on the provisions of the VAT Directive rather than the UK legislation. Only if the terms of the domestic legislation had been wider than those of the Directive would it have been necessary to consider separately whether the domestic conditions for exemption had been met. This suggests that in the post-Brexit world the scope of the insurance exemption is narrower than it...