Am I *required* to work from home?

richco

During the pandemic, like many people, I was required to work from home. This has shown to be work well for most of the employees of my company and for the company itself. In fact it worked so well for the company that they made the decision to move offices and significantly downsize the available space last year. As a result my local office now has desk space for only around 30 employees but there are at least 100 (including myself) that would call this their "local" office and would have previously worked in the office full time prior to the pandemic. There is now an expectation that most employees will work from home unless they want/need to visit an office. So my question is can I legitimately say I'm required to work from home on the basis that my office does not have enough space for all of it's employees to work there? Note although it's theoretically possible I could turn up to a full house and have to go back home again, in reality there are only a handful of people that use the office everyday and it's unlikely that I would not be able to find a desk on any given day.

If you haven't guessed why I'm asking, it's because the clarified rules around claiming tax relief on WFH expenses now say one of the following must also apply:

• there are no appropriate facilities available for you to perform your job on your employer's premises
• the nature of the job requires you to live so far from the employer's premises that it is unreasonable for you to travel to those premises on a daily basis
• you are required, under government restrictions, to work from home

So it's that first bullet I'm looking at - is it wrong to say the facilities are not appropriate on the basis they're too small?

I'm not struggling financially so this isn't critical for me, but I do legitimately have increased expenses and with the increasing cost of living every little helps.

Jeremy535897

For basic rate tax the WFH allowance of £6 a week is worth £62.40 a year. "Little" is all it is.

The guidance from HMRC is here:
https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/employment-income-manual/eim32790

Nobody has explained why the reference to the time limited easement in the final paragraph refers to an expiry date of April 2023, when it appears it ended on 5 April 2022.

A theoretical lack of appropriate facilities is not going to suffice. I think that you could only claim for a day if you called in and were told that there was no room for you. The examples HMRC give show that they have not really considered "hot desking", despite it having been around for decades.

richco

Yes I realised it was a fairly negligible amount in the scheme of things but it's more than nothing.

I figured that answer would probably be the case but all the guidance I could find seemed dumbed down so much it was difficult to see how it related to my situation. But that link to the internal HMRC manuals gives enough specific examples that yes it is fairly apparent that I'm ineligible as the rules stand. So thanks for providing that.