An employee who holds a travelling appointment can deduct all of
their business travelling expenses as travel in the performance of
the duties of the employment, even where the journey starts from
home.
There is little guidance in case law about what constitutes a
travelling appointment but a commercial traveller can be said to be
typical. A commercial traveller is travelling
on his or her work, as distinct from travelling
to it, from the moment of leaving home. Another
example is a service engineer who moves about from place to place
during the day carrying out repairs to domestic appliances at
clients' premises. Such employees are often described as itinerant.
If an employee has to report to and work at a particular
office at the start and end of the day, travel between there and
home is not travel in the performance of the duties, unless the
calls at that office are fortuitous or incidental.
Whether an employee is truly itinerant, or merely has two or
more fixed places of work, is essentially a question of fact. There
are bound to be marginal cases.
Many jobs require mobility, in the sense that an employee
will have to work at a number of different places from week to week
or month to month. But this does not mean that the duties
themselves inherently involve travelling, merely that the employee
will not always incur the same cost in getting to (or staying near)
work. Clearly the frequency with which such changes take place is
of major importance. There will be a strong presumption that anyone
required to go to a number of different sites each day on an
irregular basis will have a travelling appointment. Other factors,
however, also need to be taken into account, such as the nature of
the work itself and whether, for pay purposes, the employee is
treated as starting work only on reaching each site.
It is important, therefore, when an employee considers that
he or she has a travelling appointment, to obtain as much
information as possible about work patterns. If necessary, ask for
a record covering a typical period of weeks or months.
Even if the employee does not have a travelling appointment
it is likely that for many such employees every place that they
attend is a temporary workplace. So relief for their business
travel is likely to be due under Section 338 ITEPA 2003, see
EIM32005.
