Posted By AJM I would like to draw on a few of your learned peoples experience in the Pro's and Cons of having a company car as your post. I am thinking of taking a new safety position that offers a Car (Fully expensed)now if the yearly pay is the same as i am already on but in the new post get the car. Is there anything i should be taking into consideration for instance will i be worse off. Any advice greatfully accepted please. Alan

Posted By Stupendous Man When I looked into this about a year ago, I came to the conclusion that if you are the sort of person who keeps running fairly new cars over an average mileage there is little difference in cost. If you do lots of miles, the fully expensed bit is worth its weight in gold IMHO. The main benefit that I found though, is not financial. It's less hassle to have a company car, no worries about resale or p/x values, no unexpected servicing or repair bills, no tax or insurance to skew your cash flow. You also get treated more favourably by dealers (i.e. courtesy cars) and many manufacturers offer company car driver 'clubs' or mailing lists where you get magazines with offers and competitions. You will also find manufacturers falling over themselves to offer you test drives in new models - often delivered to and collected from your workplace. From an H&S point of view, it is also easier for the company to manage its occupational road risks through company car ownership - we should practice what we preach!

Posted By Paul Oliver This also depends on whats on offer in terms of company car aswell! Daewoo Matiz or BMW 5 series (not being derogatory to Daewoo owners out there) :-)

Posted By Alexander Falconer Hi there, following last response, would be interested to know too! Reason I have discovered company has submitted a P11 to my taxman that shows my benefits value to be some £1200 odds more than I originally thought. This means approx £400 odds a year more in tax to be paid out of my own salary. Whilst a little ignorant in affairs of the tax man, out of interest does my company benefit as a result of increasing the relevant taxable benefits on my P11? The tax bods are a little unhelpul to my query.

Posted By gham Alex They may have miss calculated your tax based on the previous years CO2 emmissions allowance, have a look at the LVL link i posted above it breaks it all down for you in the tax calculator. That's the other problem with a company car the tax level changes every year. Think of this if you pay £250 per month tax including fuel and car and were to be offerd a £350 - £450 (Net. after tax) per month allowance instead your actually £600-£700 per month better off because you don't have the CC tax taken off...... a boxter cost less than that a month on PCH.......

Posted By Homer Not getting fleeced by the tax man reduces stress and enhances health. This whole thing is a bit of foreign language to me. Do we have a tax ghuru in IOSH? If I understand so far, if you are given an allowance for a car its taxed at normal rate as part of salary, I assume you pay NI but not pension on it. Thereafter you can get a set sum per mile up to 10000 miles and then a lesser sum thereafter. If your employer is only partly meeting the sums above for fuel you can claim back this as business mileage fron VAT man ie if you get x pence a mile for only 5000 miles and then y pence thereafter, any miles you exceeded over the 5000 but less tah 10000 you can claim for. Same for lower rate?

Posted By Christopher Kelly Doesn't the IIRSM helpline give advice to members about issues such as this ? I have found them very helpful in the past on other issues. Sorry IOSH - don't mean to put your nose out of joint, I use both professional institutes for advice.

Posted By MarkJAWatkins Re: car allowance. I think that if you get car allowance (say £400 per month) you only get paid a mileage allowance on top of this of 11p per mile petrol or 9p per mile diesel. Where as you get the 40-odd pence per mile if you don't have car allowance. The problem with the car allowance is, if you are only getting 11p per mile, when the fuel rate keeps rising you have to dig into your actual allowance to fuel your car. Personally, I think the company car option is best...I am waiting on mine getting delivered. Regards, MW

Posted By Brett Day Looked into this myself as I was doing well over 20,000 (have done up to 60,000 miles ome years) miles a year and found that I was far better off with a company car: My current company car is a Citroen C4 2.0HDi VTR+ so a diesel engine, euro 4 compliant on emissions not quite top spec but has climate control, cruise control etc It is costing me £48 a month company car tax or £576 a year, it's fully insured, taxed and maintained, if breaks down I have unlimited get me home cover with a courtesy car whilst it's off the road, can put my partner on it as well. My own car when I was running one privately for work was a Citroen Xsara diesel I had a £3,000 car allowance with 19p a mile fuel rate, it had to be taxed £160 a year insurance with Full insurance cover for business £1,200, maintenance every £10,000 miles £160+ vat then £250+ vat for every fourth (major service), cambelt change at 80,000 miles is £500+ vat, not sure what depreciation was, damage during business use - nicks, digs, sratches etc. To get the same level of recovery my comapny car gets cost me £200 a year (bearing in mind most policies on offer do not cover business use especially from a construction site after a JCB has hit your car). As for insurance if you ask for business cover you will get basic class 1 cover, there are three classes of business cover that you can add to a private policy Class 3 covers visiting construction sites, my insurer at the time considered being parked in a street adjacent to the site a construction site for the purposes of the policy. One company that I worked for changed the lease cars every three years for managers but the site guys only had a £3,500 car allowance but were expected to change cars every three years - so check the small print in your car policy docs. IMO if you are doing over 18,000 a year don't bother with a car allowance unless you want to put the money towards something fancy. But for a 'normal' car then go with the company car !!

Posted By Brett Day Two points on that, when I spoke to a company accountant I was told that they couldn't give me financial advice (apparently not allowed to - conflict of interest) and another told me that the car alowance was the best option, I later found that working it out it wasn't and also the company policy was to dissuade staff from taking the company car.

Posted By Peter MacDonald Don't ask the compnay accountant. The point of a company car is your employer pays for the up keep, road tax, MOT's, fuel, maintainance etc. (although you pay tax on the benefit in kind of course) It's a no brainer they they would rather you the employee paid for it. A generous car allowance is 5 to 7k. Compare that to the up keep of a decent car over a year and it can almost be double that, especially as the car gets older. You will find that the company will offer you best value for them rather than for you. Even if you will be up to 100 pounds a month better off initially buying your car this can be wiped out if you change a set of tyres and replace break discs not to forget depreciation. Think about losing the car for a couple of days for a service or repair and having to hire a car...not cheap. Try the website cashorcar. I thought long and hard and went for company car. There is some really good deals out there. Peter

Posted By J Knight Company car by a long chalk. Don't know how anybody pays £250 p.m. in tax, and Dave W, how's the leather AC holding up? Normally it's done on a gas heat exchange principle, don't quite understand how leather would work ;-) From a fleet management p.o.v and MORR company cars are the only way to go; I'm trying to get our lot to insist on it, but at the moment the Retail Director is favouring an allwance 'cos he thinks it'll save him money,. And I utterly agree, the best bit about a company car is it's not my problem whilever I'm not actually steering it, if anything breaks it gets fixed, John

Posted By Dave Wilson Also the fuel bit has changed so you pay a % of £14,400 for fuel on the CO2 emissions of your car. If you pay tax at %40 and have a car worth £20k with CO2 @ 32% liability then its 32% of 34,400 so you pay 40% of that. =£10880 tax laibility so you pay the tax man £4352 pa if you get an L200, Navarra, Ford Ranger is a liability of £500 pa so at 40% you pay the tax man £200