This passage in @CommonsEU’s most recent report (published on Christmas Eve) makes an important point about the UK’s future VAT policy post Brexit. Will it really be independent, or will the U.K. be a rule-taker? 
Leaving the EU VAT area will create friction - for details see these articles on the @UKTradeForum website. uktradeforum.net/2018/11/12/wha…
To try to minimise these problems, the Chequers White Paper referred to agreeing “common procedures and processes” on VAT with the EU.
What does that mean? Your guess is as good as mine. Or, it seems, as the Treasury’s.
But as @CommonsEU points out, it’s hard to see how any “common processes and procedures” that actually reduced the extra trade frictions created by leaving the EU VAT area would not also require alignment with EU VAT rules.
So another vision of an alleged post-Brexit freedom (being able, for example, to exempt whatever the U.K. Government wants from VAT) seems to be turning into a bit of a mirage.
NB too the point that, during transition, the EU is likely to reduce the VAT registration limit for small businesses. A proposal on which the U.K. will be bound by, but will have no vote on (it would have been a veto...)
Full report here. VAT starts on page 48. publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cm…
