£30 - surely no longer enough for work expenses and Xmas party!

[Thursday5pmisginoclock]

For those in corporate roles where you can claim expenses…what are you company policy amounts for an evening meal when working away? Our £30 allowance feels so mean, and it’s the same amount for Christmas party! I mean what do you get for that nowadays??? Especially if we were to meet in London?

also why is the personal car payment still £0.45ppm - I am pretty sure it was that 10 maybe even 15/20 years ago!

inflation has not caught up surely…?

Is this commonplace?

It is a Christmas party!

Not a night away!

30 minutes in Pizza Pxpress with just a pizza and water may be a great night out for you but most people wouldn't make the journey for that!

@Appleofmyeye2023 I’m usually in Zurich and know zurich well enough to find what I want in budget - or let the client pay ;)
Tokyo i usually fight to get the proper expensive meals reimbursed and pay the cheaper ones (around £20 over) out of pocket. And get a hotel with an amazing breakfast.

I agree. Low paid and rewarded staff are treated like shot irrespective of whether you are private or public.

higher paid staff in both sectors get taken advantage of in terms of unpaid overtime and pushing your limits of goodwill.

The post is on expenses. And why rates are set where they are. And that’s HMRC. And applies to anyone who gets expenses.

no one gets freebies from their employer. Might think they do, but they’re always a bribe to get employees to go above and beyond, or to merely pay back what’s owned to employees in terms of what they spend doing what the employer wants them to do.

This is spot on. The reality of being away from home a lot is nothing like doing the odd trip and by the time you have done 12 hours in the client office the last thing you want to be doing is traipsing around a new location to find some cheap local Nandos (even if you don't care about your diet).

But you're saving money by not eating at home, so surely what you're saving in groceries at home needs to be offset against your "eating out" costs?

👏👏crossed posts a bit…

I have a relative who was given a selection box at Xmas . Must people get 0, so sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

@user1497207191 I spend maybe £10 a day eating at home, if that.
If you are in tokyo, Zurich etc, that’s a coffee (and not s particularly nice one), which isn’t covered by expenses anyway.
If you are in the US, you pay more in tips than that (and tips often don’t show up on receipts, so can’t be claimed).
I also work 12-14 hour days (its a business trip, I’m there to work!), so I expect a little bit of comfort.

And? Even if I removed the differential between the shopping bill when I was at home all week and the bill when I was away it doesn't cover the costs of being away and eating away on a regular basis.

There are a number of incremental out of pocket expenses of which food is a big one but everything which would 'be at home' just isn't available to you and has to be bought at whatever price you can get it. Most of those are not covered by any HMRC allowance.

Our grads all start by thinking "business travel" is exciting and a perk, within 12 months of living out of a suitcase and eating junk and hotel food most are eyeing up roles they can commute to. That's how much of a "perk" it is.

So you’re referring to the once a year Christmas Party part of the OP. That really wasn’t clear and why the hell would you go for a pizza?

This just shows how out of touch or entitled you are? What kind of evening meal are you having when you work away???? £30 is more than enough for a main course and a drink and in some places can stretch to a side or dessert too.

Mileage allowance (for tax purposes) was already 45p per mile when I trained as an accountant in 2001!

I assume it's kept at the same rate partly to discourage driving (for environmental reasons) and partly as a stealth tax - after all, no one really kicks up a fuss when the mileage rate remains the same year after year, so it's a low-impact way to maximise tax revenue

No I was saving minimal at home. The rest of the family still had to eat, they had to have heating on, lighting on, cooker on.
you do know if feeding a family of 3 vs 4 its barely going to make a dink in “savings”. Especially when the 3 left at home , one wasn’t working due to ill health, 2 were at secondary school. All three over 6 foot one inch. And 2 of 3 very physically active rugby player size boys.

5 years later I live on my own. My grocery bill for everything including cleaning stuff, wine is £50 a week. In Basel that’d be the price of one main dish and a water. Seriously.

the company was in no way subsidising my lifestyle and saving me costs. 🤦‍♀️. It nearly cost me my health. I sensibly retired before it did.

I'd be delighted with a £30 allowance towards a Christmas meal. I was in the public sector for years, and we got fuck all.

I'm in the 3rd sector now. We get £10 a head towards a Christmas meal. Some years we get a £10 Sainsburys voucher as well, but that's only in years when there's been an overall underspend on salaries because of vacancies, so the people who've been working in understaffed teams for months on end don't get any recognition for it. (My team had vacancies adding up to 50% of the entire team's hours for a few months recently, and we were run absolutely ragged.)

And our mileage rate has been 45ppm for over 16 years.

However, in every respect other than the financial, they're a fantastic organisation to work for.

I agree about the mileage rates. They need increasing.
Ive never worked anywhere where Christmas events are laid for. I’m not going to my works do.

It's £35 and it feels mean to me too. Big corporates should do free boozy Christmas parties IMHO

Mine is £35

@ActDottie nothing do with entitled. Pizza express or weatherspoons is ok for an occasional night, but not for weeks.

Pizza express: pizza around £18, 2 soft drinks £8, plus tip and there you are at £30. And that is your one decent sized meal per day.
I‘m a small person, but I need more food than that! I always loose weight during business trips anyway.

I didn't suggest Pizza - I was replying to the person who said 3 courses were not required and a pizza was fine!

We get nothing.

I used to work in local government. At Christmas we got zilch. Nowt. Nada. We weren't even allowed to leave an hour early for our team Christmas meal. If anyone tried to give us anything, we had to refuse it and report the fact that it had been offered.

So I think YABU. £30 is enough for pizza, pudding and a drink in London.

Ours is £100/ day (to cover all meals), unless entertaining a client.

Erm, you are getting confused in your “whataboutery”.

milage allowance or car allowances are paid for people who travel in work. Never paid getting to or from work. That would be an exceptional and rare perk that would send most companies and organisations out of business very quickly. assume it only happens to people like PM for security issues.

And , no, we didn’t get tea/coffee provided. We had a milk rota where money went into kitty and bought our own tea/coffee from home.

No subsidised canteen

30 mins is standard lunch in MOST work places. And like a lot of office focused staff, mostly eat at desk while catching up on emails. In my case I was lucky if people didn’t book meeting right across a 12-2pm period and manage to get any sort of break, other than quick loo, grab my sandwich and tea and straight into next meeting.

you are imagining and getting jealous of a utopia that simply doesn’t exist

£15 allowance for an evening meal and nothing for a Christmas party!
£30 feels quite generous

The £30 meal allowance when work I g away isn't over generous but It's sufficient. As for the Christmas party a lot of firms expect people to pay for themselves.