BunjimanBenjiman

Hi, I work for a local Authority but have a flexible working arrangement so in practise I have been provided with a full setup to work permanently from home and am only required to attend the office once a month as a fixed arrangement. In terms of the 24 month test, I have a fixed arrangement with my employer to work from home 98.2% of the time and only attend the office 1.8% of my time (based on one day a month). I do additionally attend the office for the odd meeting but not as a specified requirement and only rarely (once a month for 1hr on average - sometimes less). Does this mean that my home qualifies as a second permanent place of work, or does it need to be deemed 'necessary' for me to work from home and does my employer need to 'designate' my home as a 'permanent' place of work for this to be the case? The root of this question is as follows: I am a member of a team, all of whom work from home in the same arrangement as I have described above and all are required to carry out site visits on a regular basis across a wide area. Because our employer (Local Authority) deems our central office to be our only permanent place of work, we are required to deduct the distance commuted from home to the office and back again from any mileage submissions. One member of the team lives right by the central office and so is able to claim all of his site visit mileage without any deduction for commute, but I live on the edge of the Borough and have to deduct a 50 mile round trip from any mileage claims I make on any given day, even when only travelling 20 miles for local sites. This means that much of the mileage I do solely for work purposes I cannot claim back from work unless I do all my site visits on one day a month, and even then I still have to deduct the 50 mile round trip. The other day I drove 90 miles solely for work and was only able to claim 40 of those miles back. Our HR believes this is a correct understanding of the guidance given by HMRC, but I have seen un-caveated responses on this forum from HMRC to similar questions, to the effect that in circumstances like these the home would constitute a second permanent place of work and we should therefore be able to claim all work mileage without deducting the office commute. The HR response is of course; 'well what about people that work from their homes at a greater distance from the Borough boundary, surely the Council should not have to pay for their mileage all the way from their home?' I don't know the answer to this and haven't found any HMRC guidance on that point, but the last Authority I worked for simply allowed all mileage within the Borough boundary so that worked as the equaliser. I would greatly appreciate a detailed response and a clear answer to each of these points. Many thanks for you time in looking at this, Ben.