Trusts – Signpost

Trusts – introduction

This signpost pulls together all of our articles and resources on trusts. Please feel free to browse the content. If you have any queries or suggestions, then the team would be delighted to hear from you.

What is a trust?

Getting your head around this question has sent many a person, including accountants and even tax advisers, to the brink of insanity!

Trusts are a method of separating the legal and beneficial ownership of an asset or assets. In other words, one person’s name may be on the tin (ie at the land registry) but the real economic owner is some other person (known as the beneficiary).

This unfamiliar beast is supported by a perhaps baffling array of terminology (we’ve already used ‘beneficiary’) and tax regimes.

Things get trickier when the trustees of the trust are resident overseas. Here, we encounter a phalanx of anti-avoidance rules.

Thankfully, our articles in this signpost are very much focused on UK based trusts.

For more information on ‘what is a trust?’ then please see our dedicated article.

Taxation of trusts

A trust – depending on the type of trust – will also suffer taxes on creation, throughout its lifetime and potentially on winding up.

The relevant taxes are usually:

• Income tax;
• Capital gains tax; and
• Inheritance tax

Other taxes might also be relevant – for instance, if a trustee purchases a property, it might be subject to Stamp Duty Land Tax (“SDLT”).

Detailed articles on trusts

We have created a number of different articles on the topic of trusts:

• What is a Trust?
• Income Tax
• Capital Gains
• Inheritance Tax
• Bare Trust – What You Need to Know
• Interest in Possession Trust – What You Need to Know
• Discretionary Trust – What You Need to Know
• Creating A Relevant Property Trust
• Winding Up A Relevant Property Trust
• A Trust is a Trust is a Trust… Tang vs. HMRC

If you have any queries about this article, or trust or tax matters in general, then please do not hesitate to get in touch.