BIM37605 - Wholly & exclusively: duality of, or non-trade, purpose: travel costs: home to work

It is quite true that the Appellant carries on his profession at two places, but he travels between those two places not simply for the purposes of carrying on his profession, but also because his home, as the Commissioners have found, is at the Old Rectory, Whipsnade. He travels backwards and forwards between his home and his chambers in 15, Old Square because he has to live somewhere, and because he wishes to go backwards and forwards between his chambers and his home. It does not seem to me that it makes any substantial difference that he also carries on his profession and does a lot of work at a place which happens to be his home. His motive, his object and his purpose in travelling between these places, as it seems to me, are mixed.

Now it is, of course, true that on days when Mr. Newsom has to appear in Court in the Chancery Division the expense of his journey to London from Whipsnade is incurred for the purpose of enabling him to do so in the sense that if he did not come to London he could not earn his brief fee. But if this view of the position were sufficient to justify the deduction of his fares to London for Income Tax purposes every taxpayer in England whose profits are assessable under Schedule D could claim as a permissible deduction his expenses of getting from his place of residence to his place of work. On the other hand, it could scarcely be argued that the cost of going home at the end of the day would be similarly eligible as a deduction and it would be a curious result of [what is now ICTA88/S74 (1)(a)] that the morning journey should qualify for relief but that the evening journey should not. Mr. Newsom, in a letter to the Inspector of Taxes, frankly disclaimed any right to relief founded merely on the ground of having to proceed from his home to his place of work and conceded that a man's ‘profession is not exercised until he arrives at the place at which it is carried on’. In my judgement this proposition is, in general, true. Moreover, it cannot be said even of the morning journey to work that it is undertaken in order to enable the traveller to exercise his profession; it is undertaken for the purpose of neutralising the effect of his departure from his place of business, for private purposes, on the previous evening. In other words, the object of the journeys, both morning and evening, is not to enable a man to do his work but to live away from it.

A distinction must be drawn between living expenses and business expenses. In order to decide into which category to put the cost of travelling, you must look to see what is the base from which the trade, profession, or occupation is carried on. In the case of a tradesman, the base of his trading operation is his shop. In the case of a barrister, it is his chambers. Once he gets to his chambers, the cost of travelling to the various courts is incurred wholly and exclusively for the purposes of his profession. But it is different with the cost of travelling from his home to his chambers and back. That is incurred because he lives at a distance from his base. It is incurred for the purposes of his living there and not for the purposes of his profession, or at any rate not wholly or exclusively; and this is so, whether he has a choice in the matter or not. It is a living expense as distinct from a business expense.

On this reasoning I have no doubt that the Commissioners were right in regard to Mr. Newsom's travelling expenses during term time. The only ground on which Mr. Millard Tucker [taxpayer’s counsel] challenged their finding during term time was because Mr. Newsom has a study at his home at Whipsnade completely equipped with law books and does a lot of work there. The Commissioners did not regard this as sufficient to make his home during term time a base from which he carried on his profession, and I agree with them. His base was his chambers in Lincoln's Inn. His home was no more a base of operations than was the train by which he travelled to and fro. He worked at home just as he might work in the train, but it was not his base.