[2024] UKUT 00301 (LC)

The appeal has a chequered procedural history. It was transferred to the Tribunal in July 2023 whereupon the Registrar issued directions, allocating the appeal to the Tribunal’s standard procedure. On 25 August 2023, the appellant indicated that its former valuation expert was no longer practising and applied for an extension of 4 weeks to the procedural deadlines to ‘onboard’ a new expert. HMRC did not object.

The Tribunal did not grant a general 4-week extension, but instead extended the Registrar’s procedural deadlines, listing a substantive hearing before me for 18 January 2024. The parties agreed various further extensions of time in the lead up to the hearing.

On 3November 2023, the appellant’s solicitors informed the Tribunal that they were no longer instructed in the appeal, and on the same day the appellant applied for a stay of eight weeks to enable it to appoint alternative representatives. HMRC, noting that this was the second stay which the appellant had applied for, and indicating that it understood that the appellant had also dis-instructed its expert witness, took a neutral stance on the application. I refused the application for an eight-week stay, but vacated the hearing date and rescheduled it for 24 April 2024, extending the procedural deadlines accordingly, and disapplying the parties’ ability to agree a further 14-day extension to those deadlines.

On 13 December the appellant’s new solicitors applied for a further eight-week stay. HMRC objected, indicating that this was the third time the appellant had sought a unilateral extension, and it was the fourth time in the appeal (including the internal HMRC appeal process) that the appellant had changed its valuation expert.

By an Order dated 18 December 2023, I transferred the appeal to the Special Procedure, further amended the procedural timetable leading up to the Hearing on 24 April 2024, and indicated to the parties that the Tribunal would be highly unlikely to grant any further applications to stay. From that point preparations for the hearing proceeded without difficulty, with expert reports, a joint statement, and a hearing bundle being filed.

On 17 April 2024, helpful counsels’ skeleton arguments were filed, from Evie Barden for the appellant, and Katherine Elliot for HMRC. I am grateful to both of them.

On the afternoon of 23 April, on the eve of the hearing, the Appellant’s second solicitors wrote to the Tribunal indicated that it would ‘have to come off the Court record as representatives for the Appellant’.

The hearing scheduled for 24 April was vacated, and with the parties’ agreement I transferred the appeal to the Tribunal’s written representations procedure, allowing them both to make further written submissions and replies, limited to the comparable evidence already adduced.

Thus, this decision is based on counsels’ skeletons, and expert evidence from Mr David Nesbit BA(Hons) MSc MRICS MFRWS, a director of Res-Prop, for the appellant, and Mr Peter Alderton MRICS, from the Valuation Office Agency, for HMRC (‘the experts’).

I carried out an unaccompanied external inspection of the appeal property, comparing its location with that of the comparable properties cited by the experts. The parties had previously confirmed that nothing was to be gained from an internal inspection, given the large number of photographs in the bundle, and I did not make one.

I subsequently received experts’ further reports and replies referred to above.