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Capital Allowances |
19 |
C if its principal purpose is to insulate or enclose the interior of the building or provide an interior wall, a floor or a ceiling which (in each case) is intended to remain permanently in place.160 |
(b) Structures, assets and works. CCA 2001 section 22 gives us List B which excludes expenditure on the provision of an asset in list B. Section 22 refers to a ‘structure’ which it defines as a fixed structure of any kind, other than a building. Again, the legislation begins with a prohibition—expenditure on the provision of plant or machinery does not include any expenditure on the provision of structures or other specified assets or any works involving the alteration of land.161 List B has contains items which cannot qualify. List B includes not only tunnels bridges, railways and airstrips, but also any dam, reservoir or barrage (including any sluices, gates, generators and other equipment associated with it), any dock and any dike, sea wall, weir or drainage ditch; the column ends ominously with any structure not within any other item in this column. List C column includes expenditure on the provision of towers used to support floodlights, of any reservoir incorporated into a water treatment works, of silos used for temporary storage or on the provision of storage tanks, of swimming pools, including diving boards, slides and any structure supporting them and of fish tanks or fish ponds. List C was substantially widened in the course of the Parliamentary debate.162 |
(c) Land. Finally, CAA 2001 provides that expenditure on the acquisition of any interest in land cannot qualify as plant. This bar also extends to any asset which is so installed or otherwise fixed in or to any description of land as to become, in law, part of that land.163 |
24A.2.4.2 Plant or Setting: Case-Law Principles |
Plant does not include the place where the business is carried on; ‘plant’ is that with which the trade is carried on as opposed to the ‘setting or premises’ in which it is carried on.164 Plant carries with it a connotation of equipment or apparatus, either fixed or unfixed. It does not convey a meaning wide enough to cover buildings in general. It may cover equipment of any size. Equipment does not cease to be plant merely because it discharges an additional function, such as providing the place in which the business is carried on, eg a dry dock,165 but these categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive and the different scope of the allowances makes correct classification of great practical importance. It has been held that special partitioning used by shipping agents to subdivide floor space to accommodate fluctuating office accommodation requirements was plant, some stress being laid on the fact that office flexibility was needed.166 Something which becomes part of the premises, as opposed to merely embellishing them, is not plant save where the premises are themselves plant,167 as in IRC v Barclay, Curle & Co Ltd (see below). |
24A.2.4.3 Defining the Unit |
It is often a crucial question whether various items are taken separately or treated as one installation. This is a question of fact, and so for the Commissioners to decide, subject to the |