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Last week I had one of those days. You know the ones I mean. My drive into work reduced to a crawl thanks to seemingly unnecessary roadworks, deliveries delayed for no apparent reason and a queue so long in the sandwich shop at lunchtime you would have been convinced they were giving away gold bars. For the first time, however, none of this bothered me. No, I haven't converted to Buddhism but I have recently discovered that when it comes to sloooooooow nothing quite compares to the European Union.
As regular readers will know, in 2007 The Schoolwear Association launched its Untax Our Teens campaign. School uniform items in sizes deemed, many years ago now, suitable for children under 14 are zero-rated for VAT, however, any larger sizes leave the parents liable for the full 15%. We think this is crazy and, in an ideal world, would like to see all badged school uniform zero-rated. Sadly this is not legally possible and the best we could hope for would be a reduction to 5% VAT which would still represent a saving of up to £20 for the average parent.
Over the course of the last two years we have met numerous MPs, MEPs, Ministers and education groups who are all prepared to support our campaign and two Early Day Motions (EDMs) have been tabled in Parliament as a result. We are definitely making headway.
All VAT decisions of this nature, however, have to be made by the European Council, rather than the British Government, and this is where we move from smooth sailing to treacle wading. No decision after all can be made until all 27 member countries to come to a unanimous consensus. As John le Carre said, a committee is an animal with four back legs...
So earlier this year the EC reached a conclusion about reduced VAT rates. On this occasion, school uniform was not one of the items selected for reduced rates but then neither was any other product. Instead, they selected only services such as hairdressing for reduced VAT rates in order to create more jobs. At this juncture we should point out that we have subsequently found that the first proposals for reduced VAT - of which hairdressing was one - were submitted to Brussels over ten years ago (this is not a misprint reader!).
The fight to have VAT reduced on badged, upper body items of school uniform is not one the Schoolwear Association has taken on lightly. We were aware going into this that it will be a long-term campaign and now we know what we're up against. This campaign remains a priority for the Schoolwear Association and, as such, we are continuing our lobbying programme and by the time this issue has gone to press, we will have held a meeting with the Department for Children, Schools and Families.
www.schoolwearassociation.co.uk
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