Hospital parking charges and "benefit in kind"

user1977

[Deleted User] said:

The justification for charging, where a hospital is near a town centre, is that free parking spaces are filled by shoppers and commuters rather than the patients and visitors for whom they are entitled.

And even if it's not such a location, I can see the argument for having some sort of controls to ensure spaces are actually available for those who need them (rather than staff/visitors/patients who could travel by other methods).

Herzlos

user1977 said:

[Deleted User] said:

The justification for charging, where a hospital is near a town centre, is that free parking spaces are filled by shoppers and commuters rather than the patients and visitors for whom they are entitled.

And even if it's not such a location, I can see the argument for having some sort of controls to ensure spaces are actually available for those who need them (rather than staff/visitors/patients who could travel by other methods).

You could fix that by having people enter their registration somewhere in reception to be allowed out of the barrier.
By making it paid for you're just letting local people park there for a fee and the car park is still clogged up.

Aretnap

DullGreyGuy said:

Aretnap said:

WilliamS2018 said:

So to summarise, there is no basis in his belief? The belief being "car parking charges at hospitals for employees are value for money as the alternative is a punishing tax in the form of benefit in kind"?

Indeed, it has no basis in fact because (1) free workplace parking is not (currently) treated as a taxable benefit and (2) even if it was, the tax on a benefit in kind of hardly "punishing"; the employee would only have to pay a proportion of the cost of providing the benefit (20-45% depending on tax band), as opposed to the full cost if they paid for it themselves.

A free workplace isnt taxable when you are talking about a works car park, ie its exclusively for employees.

Is the case still the same when we are talking about enabling employees to park in a public carpark that is fee incurring and either having their registration excluded from ticketing, having a permit to display or some way of the machine issuing a ticket at no expense to the employee? There is a definitive benefit with a real value in these cases -v- a staff carpark which is a rather arbitrary application of a value

HMRC's guidance simply says "There is no tax charge on a director or employee within the benefits code on the provision of a car or motorcycle parking space at or near his place of work." It doesn't differentiate between car parks exclusively for employees, and car parks where the public are charged a fee.

https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/employment-income-manual/eim21685

If the fee that was charged to the general public was used as the notional value of the benefit to employees it would lead to some absurd outcomes, especially where the fee structure is designed to discourage long term parking. At one of those supermarket car parks which are free for two hours then £100 for the rest of the day, checkout staff would end up paying a bigger tax bill for their parking than for their actual salary.

WilliamS2018

Thank you everyone!