David’s demolition

I recently read Henry Wood’s article A matter of timing. Of interest to me was the example of David’s demolition and the allocation of the annual investment allowance (AIA) on pre- and post-April 2012 expenditure. The reason why this jumped out at me was because the logic in the apportionment was exactly the same as I understood previously.

However a review of the draft rules did not follow this reasoning. The result is a reduction in the entitlement of a business to AIA in the transition year which is far greater than what most advisers logically expected.

The draft law as it is written and has been debated in parliament restricts the total expenditure that can qualify for AIAs in the post-1 April 2012 period to the amount of the maximum allowance attributable to that period.

So in...