UK/French business

[AJM1971]

My husband and I are considering an eventual move to France - where we would want to live permanently. As part of the move he would be looking to run a small plant-nursery based business from our French property (I would hope to transfer my PAYE role with a global corporation to France as it's not location dependent). The permanent move to France wouldn't likely happen for a number of years but we're thinking of purchasing a property before then, as a second home, so that we can start planning for the move and the business (e.g. spending time in France getting the land ready for the plant nursery/renovating the house etc). If we were to do that I'm trying to work out what the business tax position would be - would we register the business with HMRC since we're living in the UK - even though the premises is in France? Or would we need to register it as a French business and could we even do that given we're not resident in France? Obviously Brexit is the elephant in the room here - but for now would welcome thoughts on how we would manage this in a pre-Brexit world - then we can adjust our expectations/plans depending on what happens with that over the coming months!

[AJM1971]

Just to clarify - the reason we would want to register the business prior to moving to France would be that we'd want to claim back any business set up costs we incur before moving against tax. I think if we and the business were based in the UK these would be referred to as "pre trade expenses". So trying to work out what the right thing to do here would be - given we'll be incurring some business set up costs while we're in the UK.