EBME Forums Forums Free discussion Free discussion Use of vehicles

Do any of you use your own car for work purposes?

If so, do you meet the A4C requirements to gain 'regular user' status, and do you get paid the monthly allowance?

One other question for those of you who use your own car for work purposes. Do you have to pay for a parking permit, and if so, do you claim at back as an expense?

When I was a service engineer, I used to drive my car for work but my company was giving a montly, fixed transportation allowance. But any other cost (e.g. parking and repair) is on me.

Honestly, I was not happy with that arrangement so I suggest to stay away from this deal as much as possible. Unless, of course, the allowance is generous.

I use my own car for business use. I qualify for regular user allowance which is paid montly, usaualy one month behind!
Yes i also pay for parking which cannot be claimed back anyway as is taken at source from my salarie

We all use our OWN vehicals for business use - some qualify for regular user allowance, some not, but we're all expected to pay to park on-site (& no we can't claim it back !)

Our renal tech's qualify for regular user payments as they do a higher mileage visiting home patients and two satellite units. We all have to pay for parking but can reclaim the cost on days we use our cars for work.

Does anyone have a situation where they are required to own a car for their job as a med tech, is a trust able to force you to buy a car to keep your job?

Recently, one of our tech's decided he wasn't going to use his car for work purposes (he had his reasons), and the first thing the directorate manager did was get a copy of his job description to check if it was a condition of his employment! It wasn't.

Also, we currently claim a percentage of the cost of a parking permit back, as we provide our vehicles for (regular) use on behalf of the Trust.

Most contracts only require that you have a "clean" driving licence. We stopped using our cars for work when the trust brought in car parking charges (£0 to £260 overnight). We couldn't get any reduction for using our own vehicles. The management checked our contracts and sure enough it is not part of our terms and conditions. Our renal techs have lease cars, they have a lot of patients in the community and satellite units to visit, even they couldn't get a reduced parking permit. The renal guys now do the external jobs that we used to do. We have had to find a way to fund their parking permits from our budget.

Do your renal tech's have to pay for the lease cars themselves? and do they get mileage allownace or both?

regards
Dom

Where I work we have a fleet of vans for travelling to other sites. Presumably this works out cheaper for the hospital than paying mileage for the use of technicians' own cars, which I find very strange, especially given that the mileage rate is a lot lower today, in real terms, than it was fifteen or so years ago.

But before it was decided to lease these vans we did use our own cars, and it was certainly true that a car and licence were considered to be of far greater importance than formal qualifications to do the job. If you refused to use your car, a van was not provided as an alternative, you lost responsibility for any equipment off site, and consequently you were in effect demoted, or at least denied the opportunity for career development. On the other hand, trainees with cars and licences, who were taking day-release HNCs, failed these courses yet were immediately promoted to fill the void left by the qualified, experienced person without transport. It seems to me that for all the person specifications which accompany our jobs, all the NHS is really interested in is a man-and-a-van.