VTRANS030700 - Passenger transport connected with recreational activities or airport car parking: Airport car parks

If a supplier, or a person connected with him, supplies car parking facilities and transports passengers in any motor vehicle between the supplier’s car park or its vicinity and an airport passenger terminal or its vicinity, the supplier’s charges are wholly standard-rated, irrespective of where the car park is in relation to the airport terminal. This applies even if he makes no charge for the car park itself or applies separate charges for the transport and parking.

Independent public passenger transport to airports by train, tube, bus or coach, the transport element of urban park-and-ride schemes and journeys from station car parks by public passenger transport are zero-rated (see VTRANS020000).

The question of whether the operator of an airport “park-and-ride” scheme made a single supply of park-and-ride or separate supplies of transport and of parking was looked at in the First Tier Tribunal (TC00118) Purple Parking Ltd & Airpark Services Ltd where it was decided that it was a single supply of parking and incidental transportation. This was a precursor to a hearing on the wider issue of whether the UK’s standard rating of airport park and ride transportation breached the concept of fiscal neutrality. As it was found there was not a separate supply of transportation this further argument fell.

On appeal by Purple parking [2012] STC 1680 the question of single/multiple supply and of fiscal neutrality was referred to the ECJ case C-117/11, where it was found that the parking and transport services supplied by the appellants to their customers form, for the purposes of VAT, a complex single supply in which the parking element is predominant.