CEWAP - Conditionally Exempt Works Appreciation Party


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		There is a tax scheme called the conditional exemption scheme. Its basically a loophole where the owners of works of art can defer the Inheritance Tax payments, which is 40% of their value. In exchange for this, the owner agrees to maintain and preserve the artworks, and to allow 'reasonable public access'. Since it was introduced twenty years ago the scheme has cost the taxpayer roughly £1 billion. So we'd better be getting value for money...

These works of art are put on the register by individuals who then enjoy some tax breaks, the principal of which is that the owner is exempt from paying inheritance tax (40% of the value of the item). So when granny dies and leaves you her Picasso you don't have to pay a penny in inheritance tax. The "Conditional" part of it means that the owner has to agree to certain conditions to be able to register the item. The 3 conditions are that the owner must:

keep the exempt object in the United Kingdom,
look after it, and
allow the public reasonable access to it.

The last one is where you come in and will help to verify the first two!

Nothing really, as long as the owners really can't afford to pay the tax, meaning that an item may have to be sold, possibly to an overseas buyer and cease to be part of our national heritage.

BUT, there are a whole bunch of people who have stuff on the list who are quite well off really and could almost certainly afford to pay the tax and keep the item, but they (probably advised by their accountants and solicitors) choose to put items on the Register and "dodge" the tax. Does that seem fair to you? A couple of examples are Philip de Rothschild, who paid between £400,000 and £1,000,000 in tax rather than let the public see his stuff and Nicholas Soames who paid about £8,000 in tax to take his mahogany buffet off the list rather than allow us to see it (admittedly Mark Thomas had arranged annual visits to see this particular item just to piss Fatty off!)

A new copy of the database arrived in February 2000 from the Inland Revenue and there are now over 23,000 items on the list (that's an increase of about 1,000 since October last year!). A brief and sketchy history based on Inland Revenue official press releases and database searches of the number of items on the list is shown below:

More detailed statistics are now available.

Basically you just write a letter to the agent, who will then contact the owner and arrange for you to see the item. There are time limits for responding and guidelines about what to do if you are prevented from seeing the items. Have a look at further details from the official IR leaflet if you want to find out more and if you're not sure how to start, here's a sample letter requesting to see some items.

There are some interesting owners on the list. Nicholas "Fatty" Soames owns probably the most famous item, thanks to Mark (A mahogany three-tier buffet, with plain shelves supported by partly reeded, slender, baluster pattern uprights, and the whole on four reeded and curved bracket feet). You cannot see the buffet any more as Fatty paid up the tax (about £8,000) after a couple of hundred people wrote in to ask to see it and were granted a viewing at Christies warehouse in South London. What a day out that was!

There's also The Duke of St. Albans, Winston S. Churchill, Sir Jacob De Rothschild, Robert Holden, Sir Brooke Boothby, Sir Simon Hornby, Peter Fitzgerald, The Iveagh Trustees (The Guiness family), The Viscount and Viscountess Knutsford, Lord Melchett (the real one), Sir Geoffroy De Millais and Mr G Courtauld to name just a few. Now do they sound like they're so hard up they can't afford to pay inheritance tax? I don't think so!

For more details on the CEWA scheme, how Mark Thomas started all of this off and a lot more stuff about the Mark Thomas experience, click on the cosmic graphic below.