In North Yorkshire our finance bods reached a conclusion that application fees and monitoring fees for Habitat Banks that we agree to regulate are VAT-able, as they are a discretionary service, which customer could get from elsewhere and thus it would be anti-competitive to undercut the market by offering without VAT.
We don't yet have any council owned HBs, so have not crossed that bridge yet.... But I would imagine the same reasoning applies that its anti-competitive if we offer discounted Units so we should add VAT to the BUs we sell.
In contrast, for BNG Monitoring fees that we charge developers in a Dev Management scenario (by mechanism of a s106 or a UU tied to the permission) then these can be zero VAT as these are to defray our costs in monitoring BNG associated with the permission - whether on-site or a bespoke offsite solution on developer's own land where the s106 includes this land.
Where a developer has bought BUs from a third party habitat bank, obviously there is another organisation, the RB, doing the monitoring and charging their fees. So we can't charge them again.
