Tax-advantaged venture capital schemes: draft legislation and explanatory notes

At Budget 2015 we announced a package of changes to the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) and Venture Capital Trusts (VCT):

• a new 12-year age limit on companies qualifying for EIS/VCT investment
• a new cap on total EIS/VCT investment that an individual company can receive of £15 million for most companies, and £20 million for ‘knowledge-intensive’ companies
• an increased employee limit of 499 for knowledge-intensive companies
• removal of the barriers between Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme and EIS/VCT funding

Some of these changes are subject to State aid approval and therefore legislation has not been published in the Finance Bill 2015.

This document sets out the detailed legislation that will be brought forward in a future Finance Bill. A tax information and impact note on the changes is published alongside this consultation.