However, is the 'stopping self employment form' necessary in our case? The reason I ask is that HMRC seem to regard membership of partnerships as a separate category to self employment. Something I've never fully got my head around I admit.
Yes 100% necessarry unless you will continue trading as a sole trader which i am presuming is NOT the case here.
For class 2NI purposes partnership trade income is treated in exactly the same was as sole trader income - its a mechanical process of counting how many week in the tax year you were actively either a sole trader or a partner in business same bills under same name - the mechanics of starting and stopping is exactly the same other than when you startup its different forms being completed to perform the same function - for cessation though the same form suffices as it does the same job for both.
This form must be used to notify cessation as anything you hneter on teh tax returns will be ignored ref class2!
Note you are either "soletrader or partner" or neither - so if you went straight from being partner to sole trader the next day you wouldnt do the ceased trading notification ref class2 as you are still in business for class2 stamp purposes. I am presuming though that you have
I suppose it's the only way to stop annual tax returns being requested so perhaps I'm answering my own question!
Thats actually incorrect - the form notification i linked is purely to sort out the class2ni - thats completely indpendent of the stopping of the tax forms which are done by the boxes on the tax returns when you submit the cased trading returns and inicate trade has ceased.
Generally speaking hmrc will never (unless you get the ninja department to specificlaly sort it out when it has gone wrong) - update both class 2ni and tax returns from one submision the two systems simply dont talk to each other.
I must admit hmrc could do with doing a simple well explained web page to advise people as there any many people who have ceased trading who have live class2NI in the backgroud in errorr and similarly many who are trading who arent being billed class2 as the compuer says they never started or ceased some time back despite the fact the tax returns confirm otherwise. They could do with flaging up as big box too when you login to personal tax account.