For free advice as to whether your property is eligible for Disadvantaged Area Relief, please fill out our Stamp Duty form.
History
In the late 1990's the Government commissioned the Urban Task Force to prepare a national survey of social and economic deprivation. This report produced and index of deprivation, which compared all the eight thousand electoral wards throughout England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
The index of social deprivation was the used by the Government as a tool for the better targeting of resources, for the economic, social and physical regeneration of disadvantaged and run-down areas. It also formed the basis of stamp duty relief for disadvantaged areas, which targeted the 2,000 poorest wards in the country as from 21st November 2001.
Unfortunately, the boundaries of the electoral wards were not 'carved in stone'. The electoral boundaries commission, a public body charged with trying to ensure that every vote has equal weight, periodically reviews all electoral ward boundaries. A2004 review resulted in wholesale changes - wards were abolished, renamed or swallowed up by others and many others had their boundaries altered
It then became a much more difficult matter for a conveyancer to establish whether any given property was eligible for relief. Help was apparently to hand in the form of the Inland Revenue web-based postcode search tool. However, even this came with the following warning:
"This search tool may not identify every postcode which is situated in a statutory qualifying area, particularly (but not exclusively) in the case of newly-built properties."
Thus many hundreds of thousands of pounds have been paid unnecessarily in Stamp Duty.
We have invested substantially in geographic information systems and we are able to offer a recovery service with the following advantages:
- Reasonable cost
- Fast service
- Fixed price
- No result, no fee
