Evening meal allowance - London

[Countdown]

CheesecakeRunner said:

We get £30 for evening meal, it can include alcohol but not be majority booze. It been that forever, and we get regular moans about it. £35 might be more appropriate these days, but I’ve never had a problem with it covering a meal in central London and I’m there a lot. Yes, it won’t pay for a flash meal, and I’ll often forgo booze but it’ll do the job. You’re away for work, not a city break holiday. It’s meant to sustain you, that’s all.

In fact, most of the time I book “aparthotels” so I have cooking facilities and go to the supermarket. 30 quid goes a long way then.

Agree with you on every point.

Especially the Aparthotels (I normally stay in Staybridge Suites if I can) - because you've basically got a kitchen and dining space I usually get a takeaway or Deliveroo/Just Eat and eat in the room. You get a lot more food/drink for your money and you can have the TV on in the background while you read the IPad / newspaper. Its basically like being at home

[Countdown]

boyse7en said:

I didn't know there was such a thing as "unreceipted expenses". I have t get a receipt for everything if i need to claim it back, which can be a right PITA at times. Try getting a VAT receipt out of a burger van!

Anyway, back to the OP. Last time i was in London i got a curry and a pint in Shoreditch for about £20. £35 should easily get a meal somewhere.

I didn't think so either I think HMRC have a limit of £5 per day for expenses if you havent got a receipt, otherwise they're taxable

[MrBig]

QuartzDad said:

Our global policy is batst crazy, there is a 100 page pdf listing random towns/cities/regions with max hotel rates such as

Berkshire £66
Coventry £106
Edgware £110
England £88
Heathrow £87
London £125
Salford £144
Wembley £155
Milton Keynes £181
Rotherham £38
Middlesex £42

I have so many questions...

[DanL]

Sporky said:

DanL said:

Panamax said:

Countdown said:

Steak & Lobster near Warren Street

I just had a glance at the S&L menu and note their cheapest steak is £26 plus another £3 if you want sauce with it. Desserts at about £10. All plus 12.5% service charge, so £40 to £44 with a glass of water.

I'm struggling to see how dinner would fit a £35 budget.

They do say, "Our set menu is available as a two-course at £29 or three-course at £35 per guest", although it's NOT available between 6.30 pm and 9.15 pm.

Fairly obviously, I’d say you don’t pick the steak!

Is the lobster cheaper?

The steak and lobster burger and lobster mac and cheese are, yes.

[WhiskyDisco]

boyse7en said:

WhiskyDisco said:

Are these unreceipted expenses of £35 a night? or do you have to submit receipts too? You could buy a loaf of bread and some nice bits from M&S that could keep you going for a few days. Make your own sandwiches and claim the lunch allowance too.

I'm working out in Stockholm.

According to HMRC when travelling to Stockholm for work, the max amount that can be claimed as unreceipted expenses, covering hotel, food and travel to the office is £220 for each 24 hour period.

I stay in the cheapest non-dorm accomodation for £42 a night, drink coffee for free at the client, eat at the staff canteen and once a week treat myself to a pizza or kebab. I might spend £60-£70 in that 24 hours, £100 if I have a beer.

I work for myself so I reason that I "make" £100-£120 a day tax free from this.

I didn't know there was such a thing as "unreceipted expenses". I have t get a receipt for everything if i need to claim it back, which can be a right PITA at times. Try getting a VAT receipt out of a burger van!

Anyway, back to the OP. Last time i was in London i got a curry and a pint in Shoreditch for about £20. £35 should easily get a meal somewhere.

It seems a grey area - the employment manual states that it's not necessary to have receipts in order for an employer to pay out subsistence free of tax, but the employee should retain receipts in case they were to check. And, if the employee is benefitting "too much" then I think that HMRC can then start taxing the employee.

[Countdown]

MrBig said:

QuartzDad said:

Our global policy is batst crazy, there is a 100 page pdf listing random towns/cities/regions with max hotel rates such as

Berkshire £66
Coventry £106
Edgware £110
England £88
Heathrow £87
London £125
Salford £144
Wembley £155
Milton Keynes £181
Rotherham £38
Middlesex £42

I have so many questions...

Not sure if it's like ours but on our Corporate Travel booking system you can set different limits for different cities. it could be that somebody has set different limits for each town and then forgotten to update them?

[geeks]

RedWhiteMonkey said:

Plenty of Greggs in London. A few quid for a steak bake, bag of crisps and a bottle then back to the hotel for a wk.

Have you been stalking me or something?

[VeeReihenmotor6]

I work for a mid-sized Charity, our limits are

£5 for breakfast IF required to travel from your home before 7am
£10 for lunch
£20 for dinner

No alcohol and no aggregation of amounts.

These amounts were reviewed late 2023. As we are a Charity we are not looking to feed people at the Ritz but lunch for example will get you something above a "meal deal" and the dinner limit will get you a basic meal.

The workforce works remotely but we are all on "london contracts" so none of us can claim anything when travelling to the office, only if we are out on specific charity business.

There is a separate policy for hospitality i.e. dining major donors.

[basherX]

Countdown said:

I normally stay close to Euston and the ones I normally go to are

Carluccio's near St Pancras
Agra on Whitfield Street
Steak & Lobster near Warren Street
Prezzo near Euston

I'm not into fine dining so I don't know where the above rank on the scale of "Povvo Chav" to "PBPHD standard" but they all seemed ok to me and well within the £35ph allowance.

ETA we don't allow alcohol unless it's a client meeting.

The Agra! My university rugby eatery of choice on a Wednesday evening. Glad to hear it's still going 30 years later.

[WhiskyDisco]

boyse7en said:

WhiskyDisco said:

Are these unreceipted expenses of £35 a night? or do you have to submit receipts too? You could buy a loaf of bread and some nice bits from M&S that could keep you going for a few days. Make your own sandwiches and claim the lunch allowance too.

I'm working out in Stockholm.

According to HMRC when travelling to Stockholm for work, the max amount that can be claimed as unreceipted expenses, covering hotel, food and travel to the office is £220 for each 24 hour period.

I stay in the cheapest non-dorm accomodation for £42 a night, drink coffee for free at the client, eat at the staff canteen and once a week treat myself to a pizza or kebab. I might spend £60-£70 in that 24 hours, £100 if I have a beer.

I work for myself so I reason that I "make" £100-£120 a day tax free from this.

I didn't know there was such a thing as "unreceipted expenses". I have t get a receipt for everything if i need to claim it back, which can be a right PITA at times. Try getting a VAT receipt out of a burger van!

Anyway, back to the OP. Last time i was in London i got a curry and a pint in Shoreditch for about £20. £35 should easily get a meal somewhere.

It seems a grey area - the employment manual states that it's not necessary to have receipts in order for an employer to pay out subsistence free of tax, but the employee should retain receipts in case they were to check. And, if the employee is benefitting "too much" then I think that HMRC can then start taxing the employee.

[CheesecakeRunner]

Countdown said:

MrBig said:

QuartzDad said:

Our global policy is batst crazy, there is a 100 page pdf listing random towns/cities/regions with max hotel rates such as

Berkshire £66
Coventry £106
Edgware £110
England £88
Heathrow £87
London £125
Salford £144
Wembley £155
Milton Keynes £181
Rotherham £38
Middlesex £42

I have so many questions...

Not sure if it's like ours but on our Corporate Travel booking system you can set different limits for different cities. it could be that somebody has set different limits for each town and then forgotten to update them?

It can also be related to the quantity of accommodation available in a particular place. Using the example above, Salford has fewer hotels than London so will be harder to get something low priced. It’ll be cheaper for the company to pay a higher room rate and have their employee where they need to be, than pay lower room rate but more local travel in taxis or other transport.

[Countdown]

basherX said:

The Agra! My university rugby eatery of choice on a Wednesday evening. Glad to hear it's still going 30 years later.

It's my favourite (my youngest was at UCL just round the corner )so I'd arrange to meet up with her whenever I was in London for work. It's very "old school" it reminds me of Bradford in the 1980's

Prices have gone up though and portion sizes have gone down- Between us we used to be able to have a starter, a main, and two naans for about £25. Last time it was closer to £35

[Silvanus]

£26 or £35 if you combine lunch and dinner allowance. No alcohol can be expensed. Never had an issue buying an evening meal, even at £26. I've no issues with alcohol not being allowed, if I fancy a beer or glass of wine I'll pay myself. Was out last night and had an amazing meal with money to spare.

[basherX]

Countdown said:

basherX said:

The Agra! My university rugby eatery of choice on a Wednesday evening. Glad to hear it's still going 30 years later.

It's my favourite (my youngest was at UCL just round the corner )so I'd arrange to meet up with her whenever I was in London for work. It's very "old school" it reminds me of Bradford in the 1980's

Prices have gone up though and portion sizes have gone down- Between us we used to be able to have a starter, a main, and two naans for about £25. Last time it was closer to £35

It's exceptionally hazy now but I'm pretty sure we were, after much £1-a-pint Flowers IPA in the UC Union, able to feed ourselves at the Agra for less than a tenner. But it was the 90s and for some unknown reason they seemed to like us- we weren't exactly perfectly house-trained.

[geeks]

We can expense breakfast if we add to a hotel room, though they are getting picky about where we do this as our offices have breakfast laid on so if you are in an office or in a city/town where there is an office then they can deny it (to the best of my knowledge it has never been denied as most dont take the piss) lunch we get no allowance for as the company considers that a reasonable expense of something you would be buying anyway (some of us have argued this that we work from home and if I am on client site for a week what am I supposed to then?) but they wont budge, dinner is £30 I *think* basically you can have a meal and a beer/glass of wine and as long as its not taking the piss it will be approved as a result of this barely anyone actually even gets near the limit as there is no stress about it. Anyone who thinks they need £60 a night needs a reality check in my opinion!

[biggles330d]

Not so long ago I was doing some work with a large government outsourcing company and its evening meal limit was £15... even in London. It took quite an effort to find anywhere that would provide a hot meal for that. It also in its wisdom had a hotel cost policy of something like £120 a night in London and well under £100 outside of it. We were working on a project in rural Scotland and you could just tell the 'global policy' was written by some accounting flunky in the home counties who'd never been north of Watford and assumed everywhere outside of London must be cheap. Hotels up there were at least as much, if not more than London in most cases. And the London budget was barely achievable in London.

Yet of course, they expected you to be a fully motivated and committed team player, willing to spend days on end away from home (which in itself isn't unreasonable given the work and where it was happening) but absolutely no consideration that the quid pro quo might be that to be a fully motivated and committed team player expected to work away from home so much might be that living out of the bargain aisle of the supermarket and spending nights in fleapit sthole hotels isn't going to be that attractive. Shame, as for several years before these new policies they were more than reasonable so long as you didn't take the piss and were genuinely a good company to work with in that regard. Really tained my enthusiasm and willingness to do projects for them.

[FiF]

This thread reminds me of the time the company saying the daily allowance for Kazakhstan was 5 US dollars to include all meals and drinks. LoL

[QuartzDad]

CheesecakeRunner said:

It can also be related to the quantity of accommodation available in a particular place. Using the example above, Salford has fewer hotels than London so will be harder to get something low priced. It’ll be cheaper for the company to pay a higher room rate and have their employee where they need to be, than pay lower room rate but more local travel in taxis or other transport.

That's a level of logic way beyond the reality. I'm fairly sure they got an intern to run a big data query across some ancient expenses claims, extracted the room number field and multiplied by 0.432.


e.g.
Vienna 63 EUR
Wien 99 EUR
Hannover 134 EUR
Hanover 85 EUR
Edinburgh £80
Inverkeithing £126
Ashton under Lyme £124
Birmingham £53

Completely barking, thankfully the expense submission system ignores it.

[CheesecakeRunner]

Whilst no doubt you’re right in some cases, for us it actually happens. Our room caps are loaded into our corporate travel agent, so it’s not physically possible to book outside them, but there is an exception mechanism for when hotel close is more expensive than hotel within budget plus travel.

The other thing we get, which I forgot to mention is our evening meal expense cap can be averaged over the week. Away for four nights, either do 30 quid a night, or 20 for three nights and have a slap up meal for 60 on the fourth. This is nice if you’re away for a couple of weeks over a weekend.

[StevieBee]

Countdown said:

boyse7en said:

I didn't know there was such a thing as "unreceipted expenses". I have t get a receipt for everything if i need to claim it back, which can be a right PITA at times. Try getting a VAT receipt out of a burger van!

Anyway, back to the OP. Last time i was in London i got a curry and a pint in Shoreditch for about £20. £35 should easily get a meal somewhere.

I didn't think so either I think HMRC have a limit of £5 per day for expenses if you havent got a receipt, otherwise they're taxable

There are different rules relating to international work. When working overseas (also for myself), the most important documents to retain are the boarding cards. These prove you left and returned according to the dates of any per-diem claim. Obviously without a receipt you cannot claim back any VAT but when you go to paces like Sierra Leone, the idea of a receipt for anything is somewhat optimistic, hence the higher tax free allowance.