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The rules have always been pretty clear when it comes to claiming back business miles when an employee uses their own car. These days I see more cars being funded privately than through a business as a company car, often to avoid benefit in kind tax.

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As an employee claiming a mileage allowance, again it is very clear, you can claim up to 10,000 miles per annum at 45 pence per mile which is tax and NI free, beyond 10,000 miles you can claim 25 pence per mile, again tax and NI free. All fairly straight forward but what if the car is an electric car as the HMRC do not regard electricity as ‘fuel’.

Also what constitutes a business trip? With regard to the electricity question how does this also affect hybrids that run partly on electricity and partly on petrol? I have read various reports regarding electricity which, whilst already confusing, are further confused if the company provides charging points in the workplace and therefore provides free electricity.

Some companies are paying the full fuel allowance but could this be a problem waiting to explode when the Revenue decides that as electricity is provided at work the employee cannot claim the fuel allowance. At the moment the consensus is that as there is no rate set for electric vehicles that employees can only claim for the electricity that they provide themselves. Totally unfair.

I will keep you posted on this one but in the meantime the Revenue has provided some guidelines regarding business miles as follows, recently issued under HMRC 490 Employee Travel – a tax and NICS guide for employers:

• ‘Ordinary Commuting’ is specifically excluded from being considered a business journey. This is any travel between the employees home and a permanent workplace.
• An employee such as a service engineer, who travels between different clients throughout the day and who has no normal workplace, can treat all his journeys as business miles, including the first and last trip of each day to and from home.
• An employee who works for the same company at two different sites cannot treat as business mileage the journeys to or from either site and home. But any journeys between the two offices would be business miles.
• Travel from home to a depot where an employee picks up jobs or tools prior to setting out on appointments would be considered commuting – the depot would be a permanent workplace, even if the employee spent the rest of the day away from the site.
• If an employee leaves home and passes his permanent workplace, but does not stop, on the way to see a client then all the journey is business travel. If, however, he stops at his normal workplace for ‘substantive duties’, such as making a phone call, this would be treated as two journeys – a commute to his workplace, followed by a journey to the client, and only the latter would be classed as business miles.

So there you have it, up to date advice on claiming business mileage but still with many questions left unanswered such as stopping to do some shopping or drop the kids off at school on the way to a client, and so on. By Graham Hill

OK time for a little bit of insider information. It would seem that the European regulators are taking a very close look at pollution and not because of the VW/Audi situation.

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In fact it has nothing to do with what comes out of the car but more about what gets sucked into the car. Concern is increasing as congestion reaches an all time high on British roads and with many cars and vans not fitted with stop start technology or have it but switch it off, if you are sitting in a queue of traffic there is a concentration of pollutants being sucked into the cabin.

Executive electric vehicle maker Tesla revealed the investigations when they launched their new Model X SUV with the weirdest back doors that open upwards in the old seagull style. They have a new system called Bioweapon Defence Mode (seriously) which features two air filters that Tesla boss Elon Musk says will give the car, ‘air cleanliness levels comparable to a hospital operating room’.

As Musk pointed out, they are ahead of the game. It doesn’t take a mastermind to work out that the emissions from the idling car in front has to go somewhere and it makes sense that most finds its way into the car behind.

Not surprisingly, having taken steps to stop children from being damaged by cigarette smoke it is logical that other in car pollutants will come under attack. You heard it here first. By Graham Hill