PBR: Darling may set umbrella expenses

[TykeMerc]

the problem AIUI is with overarching contracts. I.e. they want to disallow the idea that you are employed by the umbrella, and take each contract as being a separate short employment. You would then be expected to live near your place of work (= client site) or pay for your lifestyle choice with your own money, same as any other employee.

Out of interest why should an Umbrella employee travelling to customer sites be treated any differently from an employee of a consultancy whose home is officially their base? Those employees are entitled to tax free expenses reimbersal and travel at 40p for the first 10k miles 25p per mile thereafter in effectively exactly the same way as Umbrella contractors.

There really isn't a lot of difference between say a CSC/IBM/Accenture tech, BA, Architect, PM etc and an Umbrella employed contractor other than the permie has better security, paid holidays/sick/training/pension/redundancy and gets a lower rate. An employee of a consultancy might be on a clients site for any length of time, but their official base location doesn't get questioned by HMRC if they're on a long engagement.