What April Did to the Money Beside Yours
The note from your accountant lands over the long Easter weekend, and it is the kind you like: nothing to do at your end this year.
The reliefs you claim are exactly where you left them, to the pound. Which is true, and also the reason you shut the laptop a beat too soon.
The change this year was never going to arrive on your return.
For twenty years the choice between the two big reliefs was never really about the relief.
Enterprise Investment Scheme money earned you thirty per cent back on your income tax. A Venture Capital Trust earned the same thirty.
So you chose on other grounds. Whether you wanted to pick the company yourself, or hold a spread of them and keep the option to sell.
That symmetry ended over the Easter weekend.
An EIS subscription still carries its thirty. A VCT now carries twenty.
The relief was the thing the two schemes had in common, and the new tax year took it away.
All of it lands a step away from the cheque you actually write.
You back companies directly. Your reliefs are the fifty on the earliest cheque and the thirty on the next, and neither moved a single point.
So the honest reading of your own return this year is the one your accountant already sent. Nothing to do.
April's real work happened on the cap tables you share.
Because the same morning did two more things, and both change the company your relief now competes for.
The limits doubled. A single company can take ten million a year of scheme money now, not five, twenty-four million across its life, not twelve, and hold thirty million in assets before it stops qualifying at all.
The Treasury was not coy about why. Its own note says the aim is to steer the money toward "the highest growth companies."
The managers saw it coming. The trade press logged a winter scramble to raise at the old rate before it fell, which is what you do when you expect the new one to raise less.
Read that from your co-investor's seat.
A VCT manager is holding a product that just got harder to sell, and a ceiling that just got higher. Every incentive points at larger, later, safer-looking rounds.
An EIS fund keeps its thirty and can follow its winners further up the same ladder than before.
Both have reasons to leave the earliest cheque behind. They are climbing.
The rules have drawn the year's shape: money raised on a thinner relief, aimed higher up the market.
The fair objection is that some of this money was drifting up-market already, and one slow week is a poor sample. True on both counts. But the pull is written into the rules now, not the mood, and rules outlast a quarter.
So the round in front of you next month has a different crowd around it than the one you saw in March.
More relief-backed money elbowing for the two-to-five-million graduation round. Less of it, perhaps, sitting patient at the seed where you live.
The number that actually changed sits on your co-investor's term sheet.
And while you were reading the entry rules, the exit got dearer.
Business Asset Disposal Relief went from fourteen per cent to eighteen. On the million it caps at, the most it saves you dropped from a hundred thousand to sixty.
The state made the climb past you cheaper to fund, and your own exit costlier to take.
So the question for the next round: which relief is your co-investor banking, and have the doubled limits pulled them a rung or two above where you stand?
Worth settling before the names on the term sheet start doing the talking.
The first shares changed hands on Britain's new private-market venues last month: a board-games maker through JP Jenkins, an Oxford science investor through the London exchange's own platform, each in a short scheduled window.
The plumbing works. The open question is who it serves, whether these PISCES windows ever reach an angel's seed line or settle as a place for big companies and their staff to find liquidity at home. Worth watching, not chasing.
A Cambridge berry-picking robot maker raised £3m, half of it grants.
Fieldwork Robotics took £2.2m equity led by Elbow Beach plus £1.7m in grants, £775k from Innovate UK, to move its raspberry-harvesting robots from trials to working farms. Frontier IP announced it.
Set it beside MillTech and you have the week in two numbers: a £3m deep-tech round half-funded by the state, and a £44.8m growth cheque, with little in the priced seed between them. Both ends of the barbell bit; the middle stayed home for the holiday.
A London FX platform sold a stake to Apax to fund an American push.
MillTech, which automates currency hedging for corporate treasuries, sold a minority stake to Apax Digital and kept control, taking £44.8m to expand across North America. Bloomberg reported it.
The pattern is familiar enough to be a rule: a British fintech scales, then buys its next market abroad rather than at home. Apax takes a minority and MillTech keeps the wheel, which is the polite way of saying not yet for sale.
Carried interest moved into the income-tax net.
From 6 April, a fund or syndicate manager's carry is taxed as trading income, not a capital gain, though a multiplier on qualifying carry softens the rate. HMRC set out the change.
If you only write cheques, this is someone else's tax bill. If you also run a syndicate and take a slice of the upside, the reward for carrying other people's money just got re-priced, and how long you hold now decides how gently.
Read the co-investor's clock
A relief-backed fund often runs on a clock you cannot see. It has money to place before its own year-end and a target to hit, and a fund deploying to a deadline is a price-taker in a hurry. You are not.
The question before you anchor to a co-investor's price: is that the company's value, or the fund's calendar talking?
Each week there is one question here, and every reply is read and answered by hand.
When a relief-backed fund is pricing your round, whose number do you trust?
Subscribers answer this one every Wednesday. Subscribe free →
Ever taken a fund's price as the market's, then wished you had rebuilt it yourself? Reply and tell us what happened.
Replies reach the editor directly. We read and respond to every reply, whatever the question.
Rates30 Apr 2026 Bank Rate decision; held at 3.75% since March.
Tax31 Jul 2026 Self Assessment second payment on account.
Tax5 Oct 2026 Deadline to register for Self Assessment for 2025 to 2026.
Tax31 Jan 2027 Self Assessment filing and balancing payment, where EIS and SEIS relief is claimed.
FiscalAutumn 2026 The next Budget, date to be confirmed.
The Carry · thecarry.co.ukWorth a screenshot for your diary.
Nothing on your own return moved this year, and it is tempting to leave it there. The paperwork worth a glance belongs to the people investing beside you, before a good name talks you round. Then go spend the afternoon on a founder; the Finance Act has had quite enough of you.
Until the next round.
Know an investor who rings their accountant every April to check nothing changed, and hangs up reassured? Share this issue with them.
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