Wedding bells

Treatment of supply of premises for weddings

The directors of the hotel rented out the Tamarisk Room for civil wedding ceremonies. They treated the income from the room hire as exempt from VAT as a land supply (VATA 1994 Sch 9 group 1). Other services linked to the wedding were provided in different rooms of the hotel. These were treated as standard-rated catering services.

HMRC accepted that when customers opted to hold only the wedding ceremony in the hotel the supply of the Tamarisk Room was exempt. But if customers chose to use the hotel for other services HMRC deemed their supply and the room hire to be a single standard-rated supply of providing a wedding package (group 1 item 1(d)). This was on the basis that customers buying a wedding package that included the Tamarisk Room would consider that they were receiving a single supply...