Tax allowances on meals
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I WAS INTERESTED to read (CM, November 3) about employers having difficulties getting tax allowed off meal money for drivers in their employ.
Many employers (HCB Angus and PDT Palgrave Brown included) have paid these allowances, without tax relief problems for years. Other employers have paid nothing.
The latter group included my former employer, PDT Tagarts. Knowing what I do now, I think I might have done better if I had pressed for a meal allowance tax-free from the company, and let them sort out the tax.
Instead I obtained tax allowances for meal money included in the existing taxable wages of individual drivers. This reduced the income tax we drivers paid, and gave the three of us at Eastleigh Tagarts' factory handsome three-figure tax rebates and new code numbers.
This took much haggling with the tax office in Overline House, Southampton, in my own time, but it was worth it. My employers gave me all the assistance I requested, and I was immensely encouraged by a shop steward in the Midlands who had won a similar Transport and General Workers Union battle for his lads at Dudley tax office, which was written up in the TGWU paper The Record. Without their help, I could not have succeeded.
John Moulsdale, a Southampton TGWU official, got a similar tax allowance for certain 2/49 Branch drivers, and like myself, has retained records of the campaign. Legislation on this subject needs clarifying. If this is done, I am sure drivers who do not get any tax allowances or meal allowances will be better off, and the money will not necessarily come from the overburdened employers' wages bill. Both Bob Mitchell, my MP at the time, and Lord Cockfield know it needs clarifying. Perhaps we should all write to our MPs MICHAEL WAUGH Southampton