Fewer than a dozen tribunal decisions decide most of the arguments an R&D claim actually runs into. Whether a customer’s payment subsidises the work. Whether the company or its customer owns the claim. Who is qualified to speak for the science. Whether there was a project at all, and whether anyone can prove what was spent on it. This register holds one page per decision: the neutral citation, what was at issue, what the tribunal decided and in whose favour, the paragraphs that carry it, and what it changes for a claim being prepared today.
Why case law matters when a claim is challenged
An HMRC enquiry is an argument about the same handful of statutory tests every time, and the tribunal decisions are where those tests have been argued out on real facts. An officer who says the competent professional is not qualified in the right field is making the point that decided Flame Tree Publishing. An officer who says a customer’s payments subsidised the work is making the point HMRC lost in Collins Construction and then withdrew from its own manual. Knowing which is which — and which way the decision went — is the difference between a defence and a concession.
The same decisions work in the other direction, before anything is filed. Most claims that fail at a tribunal were unwinnable on the day they were signed: no contemporaneous plan, no time records, nobody qualified in the field the advance was claimed in. Those are cheap to fix at the start of a claim and impossible to fix at a hearing. That is the practical value of reading them.
What a First-tier Tribunal decision can and cannot do
It cannot change the law. First-tier Tribunal decisions bind only the parties to them and set no precedent, so a company losing on its facts puts no sector outside the relief, and a company winning does not open a door for anyone else.
What they do carry is weight. HMRC officers read them and argue from them. Later tribunals cite them. And where a decision goes unappealed and HMRC rewrites its guidance to match — as happened after Collins Construction and Stage One Creative Services — the practical effect is as real as a change in the law, even though nothing in the statute moved.
So each entry below states the direction explicitly: who won, on which point, and what remains unsettled. Where a decision has been overtaken by later cases or by the merged scheme, the entry says so rather than leaving a reader to apply a dead rule.
The register
Every decision we hold an entry on, newest first. The case name opens our entry; the citation opens the decision itself.
| Case | Citation | Decided | At issue | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tanglewood Care Services Ltd v HMRC | [2026] UKFTT 1137 (TC) | 6 Aug 2026 | Whether infection-control work in care homes was R&D at all | Appeal dismissed — no advance beyond the company itself |
| Stage One Creative Services Ltd v HMRC | [2024] UKFTT 1059 (TC) | 25 Nov 2024 | Subsidy, contracting out, and two discovery assessments | Company won on all four issues |
| Collins Construction Ltd v HMRC | [2024] UKFTT 951 (TC) | 21 Oct 2024 | Whether client payments subsidised the R&D, or contracted it out | Company won on both limbs |
| Get Onbord Ltd v HMRC | [2024] UKFTT 617 (TC) | 9 Jul 2024 | Whether an AI project advanced capability, and who can be a competent professional | Company won — the AI project qualified |
| Flame Tree Publishing Ltd v HMRC | [2024] UKFTT 349 (TC) | 25 Apr 2024 | Competent professional, one project or seven, and evidence for the costs claimed | HMRC won — no competent professional, costs unproved |
| Hadee Engineering Co Ltd v HMRC | [2020] UKFTT 497 (TC) | 10 Oct 2020 | Whether there were projects and plans, and whether the work was contracted out or subsidised | Mostly dismissed — one project survived in principle |
Register last updated 1 September 2026. It is updated when decisions land, and when a decision already listed is appealed or overturned.
Written by Matthew Jones ACA CTA. Last reviewed September 2026.
