CISR12120 | The Scheme: contractors: NHS trusts

NHS Trusts are among the bodies named in FA04/s59 (1) as liable to operate the Construction Industry Scheme as contractors if they spend over a certain amount on construction work (see CISR12050).

CIS administration

The CIS system relies on interaction with other Revenue systems for maintenance of its records. The essential requirements for maintenance of a CIS record for a contractor are the existence of

• a record on the SA or COTAX system for the contractor (although the CI signal should still be set on an SA record, it has no use within CIS)

• a record on the Employer Business Service (EBS) relating to a P(SC) or XP scheme for the contractor.

Since an NHS Trust is an employer there will already be a P scheme in operation in respect the Trust’s employees and so an EBS reference will exist. If the NHS Trust is now engaging subcontractors the scheme type will need changing to ‘PSC’ in order that a contractor record is created on CIS

However, the programme of allocating UTRs when the COTAX and SA systems were set up did not cover NHS Trusts. Special arrangements were made, therefore, to allocate UTRs centrally. This was done by South Wales Area (Service), formerly PD2, which set up SA records for all known NHS Trusts.

If you are approached in connection with the creation of a new NHS Trust, or the reorganisation of existing Trusts for which the Centralised Employers Team, NICEO manage one or more of the schemes, you should now liaise with LLP Team Operations to ensure that the necessary SA records are created and / or ceased and who will then notify the NICEO of the new SA reference to be entered on to the EBS record.

NHS Foundation Trusts

Where an NHS Foundation trust is set up, they are not treated as contractors for the purposes of FA04/s59 (1)(i) or (j) and therefore do not have to operate the Scheme.