Offshore Industry: Corporation Tax
The question
To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, if she will list the oil and gas fields that qualified for relief from corporation tax on decommissioning expenditure in the offshore oil and gas sector in each financial year between 2013-14 and 2024-25.
Answered by James Murray
It is a long-standing convention that the government does not discuss individual taxpayers, and so the government cannot discuss the tax history of individual oil and gas fields.
Companies operating oil and gas fields in the UK and on the UK Continental Shelf (UKCS) are required to decommission the wells and infrastructure at the end of a field’s life. Tax relief is a normal part of a corporate tax system where there are genuine costs to companies, and so providing tax relief on decommissioning recognises the heavy “end of life” cost for oil and gas projects.
Estimates of the cost of tax reliefs used by oil and gas companies under the Ring Fence Corporation Tax (RFCT) and Petroleum Revenue Tax (PRT) regimes, including the costs of RFCT and PRT decommissioning tax reliefs, are published at tax relief statistics gov.uk (https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/tax-relief-statistics). This publication contains non-disclosive estimates of number of claimants for each relief, where relevant data are available.
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