Private schools, pupils and their parents lose historic High Court bid to stop Labour introducing VAT on school fees

https://www.lbc.co.uk/politics/uk-politics/vat-private-schools-pupils-parents-lose-historic-high-court/

by ThatchersDirtyTaint

24 comments

  1. Should we charge a luxury tax on a luxury? What a conundrum, let’s ask these rich people here.

  2. Yes because private school IS a luxury product and you shouldn’t be getting benefits from the rest of us to subside it. Having money to raise frivolous court cases just confirms this…

  3. Private school should be banned full stop.

    Make state school the only option. Ensure funding per child is equal across the country.

    Overnight it’ll get the elites fighting for better opportunities for working class northern kids for once.

  4. Cannot see a single reason why they deserve special treatment.

  6. It’s a bit much to stick “pupils” in the headline. I don’t think the kids had anything to do with this suit.

    >The various families also said it was “discriminatory”, either because their child has special educational needs

    I’d be more than happy for state school spending to go up to accommodate kids with needs better.

  7. I went to a private school. My parents worked bloody hard to keep me there, even through some bad financial times. It was a luxury, and one they made sacrifices for. They worked hard, and I worked hard to make the most of it.

    But it IS a luxury, there’s no denying that.

    Sure, it makes life easier, but a motivated child with a stable and secure home life and supportive parents will excel in whatever environment.

    I find it hard to care abput the imposition of VAT because it had never occurred to me tgat the fees did not attract VAT in the first place.

  8. My colleague has teenagers running around with machetes in her neighbourhood and as a single mum put her kid in an affordable private school to make sure he didn’t get into local gangs. 

    It’s people like her kid who suffers, not Beaumont the III or some Al Saud princeling

  9. Commenters celebrating this obviously aren’t clued up with the follow-on pressure this will give to state schools. You’re deluded if you think the VAT raised is going to be earmarked to support them.

  10. I think this is a dumb ideological decision made mainly to pander to Labour’s class war obsessed extremists.

    But I don’t doubt the government has the authority to impose it.

    This seems like a waste of the court’s time and the litigant’s money.

  11. Politicians should have to send their kids to state school by law. Then they’ve got an incentive to improve them!

  12. Education shouldn’t be a business, but if you insist on making a business out of it then you should be taxes just like any other business gets taxed

  13. I have always been on the side of being opposed to private schools but as a parent I see that many resources are simply not available in the state sector and that sometimes parents are compelled to choose certain private schools due to their child’s learning needs. Will vary by local authority. Parents can push to raise standards, demand obligations are fulfilled, but that can only go so far in reality.

    So now I do understand parents that feel penalised by the VAT as they are already paying extra for services just not available in their state school. Perhaps the solution is to allow provision for children with these learning needs to have some exemptions.

  14. Not a surprise. Dan Neidle posted the case papers on his website and it was clear their case wasn’t the strongest.

  15. Education should be VAT free end of. Most of these schools are non profit they don’t have shareholders making money. They should tax higher incomes or something if they want a wealth tax.
    The most disgraceful part is they don’t have exemptions for special needs schools.

  16. Wealthy people tend to have louder voices and better connections. Couple that with already having more money and you very much will get the best schools in the better areas. Completely closing private schools would free up even more money too. To caveat that, you can’t necessarily control the quality of teaching by paying more money to get better teachers, but you can and will have more pressure to get things right.

    Not only that but wealthy areas have lower social care costs, which are a large proportion of council tax, meaning that more of the money can be diverted to other causes, further improving the overall provision in an area.

    We asked our local state school how much help parents could provide and were told it’s limited. i.e. while we could buy extra pencils and maybe play equipment, we (parents, not us individually) couldn’t fund building improvements or help with staffing costs e.g. additional classroom assistant. So instead we sent our son to a private school where those things are part of our fees.

    Don’t get me wrong, we’re earning well at around £100k household income but I’m already paying higer rates of tax and school fees account for over 2/3 of the household outgoings. We chose to go private because the local state schools are overcrowded and underfunded. One doesn’t have any green space, another has two classes of 30+ kids/year and no room to expand, while the local council have approved 4 huge new estates in the past decade without any clear plan on impriving local infrastructure.

    The VAT money from the ~150kids in the private school, who come from all over the region, is a drop in the ocean compared to the schooling needs across the same area.

  17. The threads here highlight what is wrong with the bulk of this country. People just want to see aspirational people fail. It’s a horrible mentality and so short sighted.

    In one vindictive class based policy we have managed to widen the gap and pull up the moat for many. “Tarquin” will still go to Eton or Harrow who are both beneficiaries of this policy due to VAT reclaims in capital expenditure..

    The small private school down the road which is seen as a luxury will close, displacing many students comprising SEND students the state has failed, aspirations students whose parents prioritise education over maybe holidays and so many others in the middle. Jobs will be lost (ar a faster rate than caused by the NIC and minimum wage pushes) and contracts from the schools that have closed will dry up.

    That SEND students whose parents were trying to help them and scrimping are now either in state school, unsuited to them, likely dragging resource and attention from other state pupils. Or perhaps they have navigate the woeful EHCP process and been allocated a school and the council is now picking up the bill.

    The displaced students are now in a state school, perhaps with their leg up, they now dominate top sets in key subjects and sports teams.

    Labour are rubbing their hands as they get to show a “sucess”, but the books don’t balance. Next up, they come for VAT on your child’s university fees….and then it settles in, now it’s a bad policy because it impacts “me”.

  18. I can’t exactly fault parents for putting their kids into a private school. I don’t have any children, but what I hear from colleagues and other people, the local state schools are a bit of a horror show. I didn’t enjoy high school, and the disruptive kids were just awful. Why wouldn’t you consider alternative options? If your kid is already in high school, whatever improvements the school or government want to implement won’t be felt until their out of school.

  19. I don’t personally support the change but this is the correct decision from the courts. Labour were elected on a manifesto which explicitly promised this change, and it would be wrong for the courts to get in the way of democracy.

  20. The part of this that truly suck, its the poorest private school kids who will suffer, the parents who do everything and spend everything penny getting their kid a good education only to be kick while there down because of the enormous wealth disparate in private schools.

    Yes, private schools shouldn’t skip taxes, but the only people truly hurt by this are the lower middle class, too poor to move, or pay for off shore tax loopholes or grants, but rich enough to not get any help and a high tax burden

    The whole system sucks

  21. Nothing appeases the Labour left more than dragging those escaping crabs back down to the bottom of the bucket.

  22. Lots of bitter people in the comments here.

    Private schools are a benefit to society by lessening the burden on the state.

    Ultra rich will still pay it or more likely, send their kids to other countries entirely. The ambitious and the middle classes will suffer.

  23. The courts have never once use human right laws to stop taxation, they weren’t about to today.

    A child never had a preference for religious schooling, that is alway impose by the parents.

  24. Someone’s holding a sign saying “ALL children matter”… literally the exact same concept as all lives matter, but they don’t seem to see the irony

    YES all children matter.. which is why we should give all of them a decent level of education and not just the lucky few lol

Comments are closed.