Zero Income Tax - by Royal Command


Travel out of Hay-on-Wye towards Hereford and just before you hit the A358 you come to a lovely old Toll Bridge across the River Wye, at Whitney-on-Wye. Toll charge? 80 pence per day per car – a snip!
Grahame Penny and the Toll Bridge

The bridge is old (1774), picturesque and all that – look at the pictures – but what really interested me is the fact that, by Royal Charter, the owners of the bridge pay no tax on the toll revenue received. None! 
Views from the Bridge

A nice little earner you might say, but hold on. I talked to the current owners, Maggie Taylor and Grahame Penny, who purchased the bridgein January 2012, and they told me that toll receipts for the three months up till March 2012 were £14,600 – but they then had to pay a £15, 200 insurance premium!

Still, it must be nice to say: ‘The Queen says I don’t have to pay income tax’. 

The Charter

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Short Story: 'Nothing Left'

Image
Nothing Left Albert had fed all his bread to the swans. The swans didn’t know that of course and continued to pester him. It was of no consequence to them that tears were running steadily into his beard or that his rheumy eyes were feeling all of their eighty-four years. Albert had told them everything. Who else was there to tell? ‘Grandad, can I borrow £20 pounds, just to tide me over until pay day,’ was how it had all started. Albert remembered this first request from David. Albert had been watching TV and, before giving his usual very considered response, had sent two puffs of smoke into the centre of the drawing room and taken his pipe out of his mouth. ‘Of course you can old chap. When’s payday then?’ ‘It’s…er…a week Thursday Grandad.’ Albert had been a little disconcerted by the ‘er’. In his day he’d known exactly how long it was to payday. Nevertheless, he’d opened his floppy, shiny wallet, smiled fleetingly at his late wife Sarah’s photograph and tak...
Read more

Apple Apps: build your own - it's not difficult!

Image
Building an Apple App used to cost a fortune – usually via an Elance contractor in India, the Ukraine or China. I did one this way, called iSmashit, and I haven’t got my investment back yet!    Apple ? Then I had a crack at doing it myself: I already had an AppStore account (courtesy of iSmashit ) and so I got an Apple Developer Licence and downloaded Xcode onto to my Apple (you need Lion OS for it by the way). I made pretty good progress, largely due to the excellent courses at Lynda.com. But I still ain’t no Angry Birds builder! Bloggers with vastly more experience than me, such as JohnChow (in my view, simply the best), have recently recommended app building programmes such as bloapp , which create customised apps for bloggers. But now we can go the whole nine yards and build fully-fledged Apple Apps for ourselves, thereby adding to Apple’s existing half million live apps! You could use Conduit - basic but effective. You can do the same thi...
Read more

A real live Heir Hunter! Part One

Image
‘I’m a probate investigator’. That was the opening line of a guy who called my landline – unusual in itself because, well, who calls a landline anymore?  ‘and I’m hoping to speak to a “David Thain”’  ’You are doing’ I replied drily.  He went into his spiel. ‘According to our research one of your relatives died intestate some time ago and the estate is now being held by the Treasury. Our research leads us to believe that your mother is a potential heir to this estate.’ I immediately thought “scam”, but let him continue. Without giving too much away he told me the year that my mother was born and that my great-grandfather – whom he named – had owned a farm on Romney Marsh. He had my undivided interest, because both facts were true. He then went on to tell me he had had to construct a complex family tree to eventually find me - the oldest son of my mother, the potential beneficiary. But he did not, and would not, tell me the name of the relative who had died...
Read more