Andy Burnham’s plans to rejoin the European Union could force the Labour government to scrap VAT on private school fees, as EU rules ban member states from taxing the provision of education.
The Labour government could be forced to scrap VAT on private school fees if Andy Burnham pushes forward with proposals to rejoin the European Union. The Labour Prime Minister declared at the Labour conference last week that “Brexit has done more harm than good” and that all possibilities remained under consideration for Britain’s future relationship with the EU.
He also indicated he will examine a “whole range of options” for strengthening links with Brussels. However, re-entering the Single Market would require the UK to comply with EU taxation regulations, which prohibit imposing VAT on educational provision.
EU member states must exclude “the provision of children’s or young people’s education, school or university education” from the levy. Saqib Bhatti, the Conservatives’ shadow education minister, suggested Mr Burnham appeared oblivious that rejoining would terminate Labour’s “spiteful class war on independent schools”.
“Now Andy Burnham wants to take us back into the EU but doesn’t seem to have realised it would make their VAT policy impossible,” the Conservative MP stated.
“I’d like to think Burnham has finally recognised the damage his party’s tax on education has caused and is now quietly proposing to reverse it. But it seems much more likely that this is another case of the PM announcing policies without doing the hard work beforehand.”, reports Birmingham Live.
“Nobody was expecting this,” one Whitehall source said, in the wake of Mr Burnham’s EU promise. “Officials were totally reeling. It was a million miles away from what they have been working on.
“It’s exciting to have more ambition, but they also need to work out what to do next. It’s a new world they’re in.
“It could be very significant,” one cabinet minister said. “We need clarity about our long-term relationship with Europe. It’s been a bit crablike, and things have changed since 2016 because of the Ukraine war and Donald Trump. But there are a lot of unanswered questions. I don’t really know what the end destination point is.”
A recent YouGov poll doing the rounds in Downing Street revealed 59% of Britons now back rejoining the EU, nearly twice the 32% who are against it. Amongst Labour supporters, the figure in favour stands at 85%, while for Liberal Democrats it reaches 76%, and among Greens it hits 83%.
Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, argues a fresh approach is vital to smash through the economic “glass ceiling”. “What was on the agenda in the Starmer era was so modest that it doesn’t really deliver much for the EU. Friedrich Merz in Germany or Pedro Sánchez in Spain or Giorgia Meloni in Italy have got quite a lot of things on their plate at the moment, so they weren’t very interested,” he said.
“You’ve had the European Commission on autopilot negotiating at snail’s pace, then the French putting more and more barriers in the way of the UK. I think what Burnham’s done has completely changed the dynamics around this, so people are sitting up and paying attention in a way that they really weren’t before.”