What happens when GP practices merge

Key points

• In practice solicitors dealing with mergers of GP practices allow the practice with the largest potential SDLT charge to continue and merge the other one in.
• From a legal perspective ultimately one partnership must disappear rather than two becoming one and the same.
• It is unlikely that there would be a nil SDLT outcome if profit sharing ratios aligned to form a series of transactions – and even if they were ‘made’ to align somewhat to reduce the charge then s 75A anti-avoidance could be hovering in the alleyway.

What happens with stamp duty land tax (SDLT) when two GP partnerships with properties ‘merge’ and what is a partnership merger?

This was the question in Taxation’s readers’ forum query 20 272 ‘SDLT on freehold owned by partnerships’ (tinyurl.com/fhnzhj4z) (24 February 2024). The conclusions – as is often the case with readers’ forum complex issues –...