Gray v Seymours Garden Centre (Horticulture) (A Firm)
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judgment Date | 01 April 1993 |
| Date | 01 April 1993 |
| Court | Chancery Division |
Chancery Division
Before Mr Justice Vinelott
Income tax - first year capital allowance - plant house
The expenditure incurred by a garden centre on the construction of a plant house in which plants could be maintained in a good condition until sold did not qualify for a first year capital allowance. It was not expenditure laid out on the provision of "plant" for the purposes of section 41 and 42 of the Finance Act 1971.
Mr Justice Vinelott so held in a reserved judgment in the Chancery Division in allowing an appeal by the Crown from a determination by Putney general commissioners that had upheld an appeal by Seymours Garden Centre against an estimated assessment to Schedule D, Case I, income tax for 1984-85 in the sum of £100,000.
Mr Timothy Brennan for the Crown; Mr Robin Mathew, QC, for the garden centre.
MR JUSTICE VINELOTT said that the commissioners' decision was simply that the expenditure of £14,902 on the plant house was on the provision of "plant". The question thus was whether on the facts found by them their conclusion was one which a reasonable tribunal properly instructed as to the law could have reached.
The further question whether, if the expenditure was not on "plant" within sections 41 and 42 of the 1971 Act, the plant house attracted a writing down allowance under sections 68 and 69 of the Capital Allowances Act 1968 had not been decided by the commissioners.
The commissioners described the plant house as a structure that protected growing plants from the weather but also created an environment in which plants would grow and maintain their quality of growth which could not be achieved in any other structure. It was synonymous with a glasshouse.
Plants were already in saleable condition when they reached the plant house which was specially designed with an interior irrigation system. The internal layout allowed customers, with or without trolleys, free passage between the benches.
Some plants, bay trees and camellias, remained in the plant house for up to ten months; some were purchased from abroad and required special treatment that could be afforded in the plant house; some sold within two weeks.
There was also before the commissioners a written report by a nursery garden specialist. That report made it clear that the plant house was a fixed structure designed to maintain plants of many different kinds moved from...
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Gray v Seymours Garden Centre (Horticulture) (A Firm)
...Allowances Act 1990 section 22Capital Allowances Act 1990, s. 22). This was an appeal by the taxpayers against a judgment of Vinelott J ([1993] BTC 213), allowing a appeal from the determination of the general commissioners for Putney, whereby the judge held that a glasshouse specially cons......
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...on are not plant. The two more recent cases are Carr (HMIT) v SayerTAX [1992] BTC 286 and Gray v Seymours Garden Centre (Horticulture)TAX [1993] BTC 213. In Carr v Sayer Nicholls V-C held that purpose-built quarantine kennels were not plant. He said at p. 293: On the primary facts found by ......
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...was carried on. The essential question was, as Lord Justice Nourse had put it in Gray v Seymours Garden Centre (Horticulture)TLRUNK (The Times April 7, 1993; [1993] 2 All ER 809), whether what was identified before the commissioner as the structure of the substation, that is, those items id......