Employees Travelling Outside the UK: Expenses Rate
House of Commons · Westminster Hall · 14 Jul 2026 · 5 speeches · Official Report
I beg to move, That this House has considered expenses rates for employees travelling outside the UK. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I am calling on the Government to ensure that serious consideration is given to reassessing the scale rates for expenses and subsistence paid to employees who by nature of their work are required to travel outside the UK. My constituency of Crawley is home to Gatwick airport and many workers, including pilots and cabin crew, who are required to spend considerable time abroad with the flights they crew. That can last from several hours to several days for those working long-haul flights. Time spent away from home in foreign cities, without access to kitchens or other domestic utilities, can be overwhelmingly expensive, particularly for junior members of the cabin crew, whose salaries, according to the National Careers Service, begin at around £19,000. It is right, therefore, that employers pay tax-deductible subsistence payments to their employees, to cover the costs associated with travel necessary to do their jobs. Under the previous Government, to save companies having to check every single receipt that an employee accrues while abroad, His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs introduced a benchmark expenses rates for employees travelling outside the UK. Those were first published on the Government’s website in 2013, with unique rates produced for almost every one of the world’s major cities, setting out the...
I represent Horsham, an adjacent constituency, and very much experience the same problems, so the issue is not rare. I have many cabin crew in my area who say the same thing. One of the people affected is trying to get leave to remain, but the visa application is made extremely complicated by going back and forth out of the country, so I very much support the hon. Member and emphasise to the Minister that it is not a small problem.
I take that fully on board. I am delighted that the hon. Member is here for this debate. There are cities in Europe where the situation is even more pronounced than in Amsterdam. In Budapest, the total residual rate set in 2013 and unchanged since 2014 has been eaten away by a compound inflation rate of 67% in Hungary. The current payment of 16,000 forints is well over 10,000 forints, or 40%, lower than it should be. The worst example among European capitals, however, is in Ankara. In the years since the overseas subsistence rates were first set, Turkey has experienced huge inflation. Prices have risen at an average of 22.5% every year. Despite that, Ankara’s residual rate remains at 240 lira, as set in 2014. If it had increased with inflation, it would be over 2,500 lira today, which represents an unrealised tenfold increase. In these situations, as a direct result of the Treasury not having revisited those rates over the last 12 years, airlines and other organisations are able to justify under-compensating their staff by pointing to what is essentially Government guidance. When I wrote to the Treasury with those concerns last year, the then Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, my right hon. Friend the Member for Ealing North (James Murray), informed me that in situations where expenses rates do not cover the actual costs of needing to eat, drink and sleep while abroad for work, the employers can instead choose to “pay actual expenses incurred”. Unfortunately, not every...
It is a pleasure to speak in this debate with you in the Chair, Sir Christopher. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Crawley (Peter Lamb) for raising this important issue today and for the work that he and neighbouring MPs, on a cross-party basis, have been doing to highlight the concerns that their constituents have raised with them. I can see that hundreds of people in the Crawley constituency have signed the petition. It is similar in Horsham and people near Heathrow and other major airports have signed it, too. The issue clearly affects many staff who work in the airline industry and, as my hon. Friend points out, particularly affects those who are on lower wages. Yes, they might enjoy and love the travel and going to visit so many different places as part of their work, as well as the benefits that come from a job working in the sky and working for airlines, but there are costs associated with being away from home. It was right to have the overseas scale rates system in place back in 2014, but it is not right at that the system has not been updated since then. The OSRs play an important role in reducing administrative burdens when employees incur subsistence costs while travelling overseas, and the key thing is that they provide a practical alternative to reimbursing and evidencing every single expense. As a result, if they were abolished at any point in the future, that could place a significant burden on airlines, which is certainly something we want to avoid. As my...
Sitting suspended.