As the new school year approaches – and this writer’s pleasant summer commute in and out of Surrey threatens to again become a Gehenna of squawking brats with no concept of personal space – the silly-seasoners at Baker Tilly have realised parents will soon be feigning shock at having to buy new uniforms for offspring who’ve physically grown over the past 12 months.

As such, the accountancy firm’s press office has cobbled together a wee roll of facts to celebrate 40 years of kids’ clobber being zero-rated for VAT purposes. I've done up its tie, buttoned its blazer and present it here (because it’s not just tax advisers who are having a slow week):

• HMRC use a table of measurements based on the average size of 14-year-old children to determine whether or not clothes should be zero-rated.
   
• Age 14 is accepted by the Revenue as being the time at which a youngster’s body size becomes indistinguishable from that of most adults. (Pah! My mum’s shirts fit me until I was about 18.)
   
• VAT will be payable at 20% if a garment’s measurements exceed specific supplementary thresholds drawn up by the taxman. That’s bad news for the guardians of very big kids, unless they can prove the item was designed for/suitable only for a child under 14. The solution: oversized t-shirts featuring a teddy bear saying, “I am 13”?
   
• Proposals put forward over the years to change qualifying criteria for the zero-rating have been chucked out by parliament, generally on the basis that unusually small and/or thin adults would benefit from the relief. Tory chancellor Anthony Barber slobbered over “slim and nubile young women” in his 1973 Budget statement, claiming the waist measurement of the current Miss World, Australia’s Belinda Roma Green, was “that of an average 12-year-old girl”, in a ridiculous attempt to make his point.
   
• Government has dismissed as unworkable the zero-rating of school uniforms independently of the wider rules for kids’ clothes, because of the difficulty of defining exactly what a uniform comprises. The alternative, the nationwide abolition of school-specific gear, would lead to rivers of blood in the streets and a thousand years of darkness, a Daily Mail editorial once claimed, possibly.
   
• The government has resisted EU proposals – shocker! – for VAT harmonisation across Europe that would have resulted in VAT being charged on children’s attire.
   
• Hats and gloves made from rabbits, sheep or lambs can be zero-rated, but other clothing made of ‘luxury fur skin’ is subject to the standard 20% (as any owner of ferret-skin underpants knows).

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