Alistair Darling today issued a major concession to the forthcoming capital gains tax changes due to come into effect on 6th April.

A new 10% Entrepreneur’s Relief is to introduced (similar to the old Retirement Relief), for business owners selling up and making gains of less than a million pounds. Under the CGT plans announced at the end of last year, the existing taper relief would have been replaced with an across-the-board flat 18%, meaning an effective 80% hike in tax rates for vendors. This will now be lowered to 10% for business sale gains of under one million pounds.

Small business owners should welcome these changes, as it certainly goes some way to reclaim the ‘entrepreneur spirit’ many outraged business pressure groups have said the government had damaged with the new proposals.

Nobody I have spoken to about this has yet manged to locate the fine print on the government website, so watch out for the devil in the details!

Tags: , capital gains tax, cgt, entrepreneurs, small business