A poet cannot dictate how their poem should be read. Once the words are published to the world, they lack the authority to determine the poem’s meaning. That is not to say that the poet’s subjective intention should be disregarded, indeed it may provide context for how the poem should be read. Critically though, the words become alienated from the author’s control. This too is the general case with regard to words in statutes subject to the narrow exception established in Pepper (Inspector of Taxes) v Hart. What the sponsoring minister states about a Bill generally provides no more than context. The meaning and hence the underlying purpose of the statute, in other words the content of the rules, should be derived from a close reading of the text.

This separation of the context from the content of words in a statute is one principle of statutory construction which underpinned the judgment of the Upper Tribunal (UT) in Scott v HMRC. The other principle is that, when searching for the purpose of words in a statute, the tribunals and courts will seek to interpret legislation in a manner which brings coherence to the law. When these two principles are combined, as demonstrated by HMRC’s success before both the First-tier Tribunal (FTT) and the UT in Scott v HMRC, a taxpayer will struggle to convince a tribunal or court that a broad policy goal mentioned in a ministerial statement should be used in order to produce what approaches incoherence across statutory provisions. Further, the case illustrates the inefficiency of the limitation on public law issues being heard by the FTT.

My case note on Scott v HMRC has now been published in the British Tax Review and can be downloaded here from SSRN.