NHS Car leasing and Salary Sacrificing Schemes - advice please

[Katie0705]

Hello everyone

Could someone possibly help me? I am just about to rejoin the NHS as an employee, and would like to see if the car leasing or salary sacrificing scheme is a feasible option for replacing my car.

I don't fully understand either of the schemes yet, so any knowledge and advice you can share with me would be gratefully received.

Many thanks and best wishes
Katie 💐💐💐💐

Hey Katie

Funny you should ask this, my dh put this scheme in place for the trust he works for at the moment, he's changing jobs soon still within NHS and hopes to set the scheme up again there.

If you want to post a list of the queries you have and I'll ask dh later on tonight if he could answer your points for you.

Thank you so much, this is very kind of you. What I would like to know are the following:
The benefits of the NHS leasing scheme
Implications for tax
How does the NHS leasing compare to personal leasing?
Anything specific I need to consider

I really do appreciate your help, so a big thank you again 💐💐😀

My NHS lease car means I put the fuel in and all the other expenses are taken care of by the lease company. It works out cheaper than the personal lease my son had as all of my servicing/insurance/road fund licence/consumables come out of the lease. At the end of the term I have an option to buy the car if I want to. For me, it has been a year of trouble free motoring.

In my trust OP you must be doing a certain amount of business miles to qualify for the lease car scheme. We have to input our personal and then business miles and each person gets a separate quote based on that. In the same way if you go over then you have to pay an excess charge. It might be worth your while to apply once you have been in post 6 months as by that time you'll have a good idea what your mileage is like. I love my lease car. I never need to worry if anything goes wrong. Your taxed on the CO2 emissions of your car. There is a list of it somewhere on the internet and I think Whatcar magazine publishes it too. Good luck I know that trusts are quite strict on who qualifies for lease cars now as they do cost them quite a bit of money.

I worked for a local authority and we had lease cars. Cost £150 all in, tax, insurance, repairs, per month.

I found that a bit too expensive tbh but it was a decent scheme. For £150 you could get a small VW Up.

One thing that I think hasnt been mentioned yet. By entering into a salary sacrifice scheme, if you are in the new NHS pension scheme (ie 2015) it will impact negatively on the NHS pension you will be entitled to. The last NHS organisation I worked for was discouraging staff from having lease cars funded this way.

I have a privately leased car. As I'm in the - very old - NHS pension scheme, I also got a quote for an NHS lease car. For the model of car I wanted, it was considerably cheaper to lease privately than through the NHS so its definitely worth comparing quotes and not just assuming that it would be cheaper to do via the NHS just because it was for someone else.

Salary sacrifice in my trust works out more expensive than trust lease cars, but you have to be doing a certain amount of business miles to qualify for the trust lease scheme. Down side is that you get less money per mile on the trust lease scheme than you would get for a privately owned / privately leased car, so swings and roundabouts really. Another thing is that trust lease does not take into account credit rating whereas private leasing would.
I'm in the process of test driving a few small cars and getting quotes from both private and trust leasing. I'm not bothering with salary sacrifice at all.

Thank you so much, this is very useful
Best wishes
Katie 💐

Dear everyone
Thank you so much for the valuable information and advice, this has been really useful. I am grateful to you all for your time and kindness.
Best wishes
Katie
💐💐💐

Depends on which scheme, salary sacrifice schemes are tax efficient but depends on the level of car emissions. My experience they are cheaper than personal leases however they can impact on your pension since you accept a reduction in salary, particularly if you are within three years of retirement.