Never think that a final salary pension (or 4/5ths pension) is certain, many people with these pensions have found that they didn't get what they were expecting or what they paid for. I think there are new rules now which offer more protection, but if the money isn't there because of poor growth/bad investments etc and the company can't make up the short fall or they have gone out of business, then you don't get your pension. It happened to a lot of people I worked with at a company, they ended up with nothing. My view is to spread the risk as much as possible and have several investments.
I think you can buy a house do it up and then sell it without CGT as long as you live in it for a certain period, but as soon as you buy more than one house you get stuck with it.
They always do checks on house ownership now when you buy or sell due to the money laundering rules.
It's not worth messing with the Inland Revenue, VAT or Social Security. We had a VAT audit because somebody messed up the VAT return form, we had to spend a lot of time going through everything with an inspector and fortunately we do everything by the book so there was no problem, but I wouldn't want to upset them.
