The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, pledges to help the UK oil and gas industry by delivering an ‘innovative’ tax policy from November 2018. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, has pledged to help the UK oil and gas industry by delivering an ‘innovative’ tax policy from November 2018. “We will introduce transferrable tax history for transfers of oil and gas fields in the North Sea,” said Hammond in his 2017 Budget speech. Hammond said the tax policy will ‘encourage new entrants to bring fresh investment to a basin that still holds up to 20 billion barrels of oil’. Currently in the UK oil and gas sector, the history of tax paid remains with an asset’s original owner, even when the asset is sold. As a result, buyers can perceive fields to be less attractive commercially, partly because they are unlikely to be able to access the […]