Tax Relief from Working from Home - With reference to the recent Tube/Railway Strike

ayers

Hello. With the recent tube and railway strike, my company closed their offices on both the 21st and 23rd of June and instructed all employees to work from home. My company are very flexible when it comes to home working. However, I was wondering if this qualifies to claim tax relief for the tax year in a similar way to when covid-19 was at it's peak?

Grumpy_chap

There is no automatic "one day at home, claim the whole year" process at present.  If you do claim because of the train strike, it will only be tax relief against one week at the standard allowance rate (unless you can show actual costs).

Jeremy535897

Grumpy_chap said:

There is no automatic "one day at home, claim the whole year" process at present.  If you do claim because of the train strike, it will only be tax relief against one week at the standard allowance rate (unless you can show actual costs).

Actually, that particular time limited easement does not expire until 5 April 2023. The problem now though is that when you were obliged by law to work from home due to coronavirus restrictions, you fulfilled the conditions. But if there is no such requirement in 2022/23, then you have to fulfil the conditions in another way. There is some guidance here:
https://www.gov.uk/tax-relief-for-employees/working-at-home
https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/employment-income-manual/eim32790

There is no specific guidance on the sort of action your employer has taken, but I can see that HMRC would be extremely reluctant to accept that a temporary closure of a workplace due to a strike would meet the conditions. Arguably if there was a fire at a place of employment and it was temporarily shut, that too should qualify.