Tax

The Income and Corporation Taxes Act 1988 was not excluded from the general principle of purposive and contextual construction of all legislation (the Ramsay principle). That principle had displaced the more literal, blinkered and formalistic approach to revenue statutes often applied before Ramsay.

The 1988 Act provisions on the taxation of life insurance policies were to be given a purposive construction in order to determine the nature of the transaction to which they were intended to apply. The court then had to decide whether the actual transactions answered to the statutory description, having taken account of their overall effect.