Employees Travelling Outside the UK: Expenses Rate

Debate between John Milne and Peter Lamb

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Westminster Hall

[Peter Lamb (Crawley) (Lab)]

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 average cost of drinks, breakfast, lunch and dinner, a night in a hotel room and even the journey from hotel to office. Each city had also been given broader non-specific subsistence reimbursement rates. Demarcated across specific time boundaries, that is a rate for when employees spent more than five hours in a given city, with another for when they spent more than 10 or 24 hours there.

The detailed task of producing those rates over a decade ago is evidenced by the fact that HMRC went to the effort of making unique assessments city by city, and that the increase in reimbursement between five, 10 and 24 hours is not only non-linear but unique to each city. Despite the time and effort put into producing those bespoke rates, they have been upgraded significantly only once in the past 13 years—in October 2014, a year after they were first produced—and that only included a fraction of the cities listed.

Despite assurances that the Government keep under review all taxes, including overseas subsistence rates, if we check their website, we see that rates payable to an employee who has travelled to Zagreb for work are listed in Croatian kuna, even though Croatia joined the euro on 1 January 2023. The subsistence rates for at least 15 European capitals, including Athens, Madrid, Lisbon and Dublin, have never received an update. Due to more than a decade of inflation, those benchmark values have been eroded in real terms.

Ahead of this debate, using the total residual rates produced in 2013, and nation-specific consumer price index inflation figures from the World Bank Group, we have calculated today’s expected subsistence rates for European destinations. Amsterdam’s total residual rate in 2013 was set at €71; a year later it was raised to €72, where it remains today. According to World Bank Group data, prices in the Netherlands in the 12 years since have risen by an average of 2.6% a year. That compounds to a 36% increase over that period. Had the 2013 rates for Amsterdam increased in line with inflation, workers who had spent more than 24 hours in the city would now receive more than €96. The fact that those rates have been ignored for so long means that cabin crew and pilots—including constituents of mine and those in adjacent areas—are losing out on subsistence payments of more than €25.

[John Milne (Horsham) (LD)]

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.

[Peter Lamb]

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 company chooses to do that for their employees, with many of them instead choosing—I do not think this will be a surprise to any of us—to pay the lower rate, the Government’s fixed rate.

The issue has a real and detrimental impact on the working lives of cabin crew. A constituent of mine working for an airline operating out of Gatwick airport was blunt about this, telling me that the fact that the rates are so far behind reality means that they have been forced to “miss meals” while abroad for work.

Another constituent stated that

“current scale rate allowances do not reflect the real costs we face on these trips”,

and reiterated that

“the allowance provided does not cover even the most basic meals.”

It is evident, therefore, that overseas scale rates must be raised. That is why I was delighted when, in his written statement, my hon. Friend the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury committed to reviewing and uprating them last month. This has been a long time coming. While simply increasing the 2013 rates in line with inflation would be welcome, I hope the Treasury takes the opportunity to undertake a full review of how subsistence rates can be systematically improved.

Having secured this debate, I was contacted by Virgin Atlantic, which, among other things, raised concerns that there are some destinations where the current rate might not reflect the full cost of subsistence for an individual visiting or living in the city. For instance, it provided the example of Lagos where safety restrictions require pilots and cabin crew to remain in their hotels and rely on higher cost room service or onsite dining. It is its view—one that I share—that any review should give consideration to those concerns and ensure that safe accommodation is made affordable under new rates.

I am well aware that questions related to tax pose difficult decisions for Governments, particularly in times of global economic uncertainty such as these. But I would hope that we would all accept that people should not go without meals while undertaking travel essential to their work, particularly where those individuals might already be on a very low wage. I will closely follow the outcome of the Treasury’s review of overseas scale rates, and I hope that the various issues I have highlighted today are reflected in its outcome.

Gatwick Airspace Modernisation Review

Debate between John Milne and Peter Lamb

Wednesday 18th December 2024 Westminster Hall

[John Milne]

I thank the right hon. Member for his intervention. I am aware that he has been fighting this cause for a very long time. I certainly agree with his comments and the need for a truly national process on this.

The problem is identified by the CAA as a

“scarce expertise in the industry…leading to inconsistent standards and variable quality”

in airport change process submissions. Unfortunately, the Gatwick review will be completed before this new body is even established. Could we be overestimating the negative impacts of this new route? Are residents exaggerating the damage it might do to their wellbeing? We can confidently say that it is no exaggeration, because the same route has already been experimented with before. Back in 2014 a trial was run called ADNID, following more or less the same line. The impact was immediately disastrous, causing a storm of complaints—so much so that the CEO at the time said that the trial route would never be used again. Yet here we are, 10 years later, and ADNID mark II has arrived.

Although Gatwick claims that these proposals would remove traffic from the existing pathway population swathe, not a single population centre would actually benefit from the change. For the first time, the options being presented to the public consultation bring in thousands of residents who were not previously overflown, contradicting GAL’s own policy of deconfliction. The forceful objections raised in 2014 are being ignored.

Gatwick’s route selection cannot be justified on environmental grounds either. Airspace modernisation is designed to reduce carbon emissions from air travel through more efficient flying. Although that may be achieved as a whole in the FASI-S project, the reduction in emissions is largely achieved by the changes made above 7,000 feet. The emissions and their impact under 7,000 feet are simply not being analysed and nor are the potential harms, which are not even mentioned in stage two of GAL’s FASI-S consultation.

The consultation process as a whole lacks transparency. There are many questions that I believe the public need answers to. No defined methodology for shortlisting flightpath options has been put forward for public consultation. Why is GAL allowed to pick and choose proposed flightpaths without independent review or scrutiny? As stated, the options show little or no variation. It is not three choices—

[Peter Lamb (Crawley) (Lab)]

I am well aware of many of the points the hon. Member is making. In fact, back in 2014 I was on Gatwick’s consultative forum as a community representative and I was well aware then of the impact that the trial route had, in terms of concentrated noise in some areas and the consequent storm of community feeling. However, I suppose that one of the key problems will ultimately be that if we are trying to rationalise airspace with a complex set of interconnecting airports, there will only be a finite number of routes that can reasonably be taken in order for that rationalisation to happen.

Beyond that point, my broader concern is that in enabling a far more efficient set of flightpaths, ultimately what we are doing is enabling far greater capacity in terms of flights in our region. As I am sure both the hon. Member and the hon. Member for Mid Sussex (Alison Bennett) will agree, north Sussex’s infrastructure is already completely overloaded from dealing with the existing levels of demand from the airport and the associated industries. Any growth in capacity will require someone—either the airport or the Government—to step in and significantly invest in our communities to make sure that they do not suffer the ill effects of far greater levels of aviation in our region.

[John Milne]

I thank the hon. Member for his intervention. Indeed, part of the problem is that this process is in isolation from 100 other issues; infrastructure is very much one of them, because, as he says, it is already sadly lacking.

As I was saying, the options show little to no variation from each other. It is not three choices; it is one choice repeated three times. Without sight of a genuine alternative that builds on the structure already in place—using routes that already bear traffic—how can the public understand the trade-offs of different pathways? It is worth noting that Heathrow has three clearly varying pathways, which differ in direction and geometric shape from each other, for the public to consider.

If the Gatwick consultation is sound, why has the CAA launched a separate consultation about setting up a national body for the review? That implies that the current model of individual airports designing individual strategies is not working. Is the current governing policy from the CAA, which is known as CAP1616, up to date? Does it consider modernisation of satellite technology and the impact that technology is having on flight concentration? If not, the modernisation of Gatwick could have serious environmental and health consequences for communities such as mine in Horsham.

Why does GAL seem to be rushing for this consultation to be implemented in 2027 when full technical technological roll-out cannot be achieved by 2030 at the earliest, or by 2035 according to other estimates? Why have alternative routes been dismissed on the basis that they conflicted, due to inter-airport conflict, despite there being a pre-agreed process to deal with that by using the Airspace Change Organising Group at a later date? That is not a basis on which to dismiss alternative options.

Airport modernisation is a nationally important ambition: I certainly do not dispute that. Opportunities to make large-scale, comprehensive changes to the entire national network come only once in a lifetime. Therefore, it is absolutely essential that we carry out the process using the most up-to-date guiding principles, with high levels of scrutiny and consultations that provide residents with a real choice. Without doing so, how will we obtain an outcome that is balanced and fair to both airports and communities?

Retaining the southerly route would make negligible difference to carbon emissions or efficiency, but the benefits to residents would be enormous. Public wellbeing is supposed to be a key part of this process, but it seems that we are sacrificing those three villages for no good reason. I therefore ask that the process be reconsidered such that all the communities around Gatwick and the other 19 airports can be presented with a credible and rational set of alternatives. That process must account for the findings of the recently published “Fair and Equitable Distribution Interim Report”, which was financed by the CAA specifically for that purpose. If we carry on as we are and take no action, we risk that important review being vulnerable to unwanted outcomes and a conflict of interest. I urge the Minister to consider the process again and ensure an outcome that will be accepted as legitimate by the public as a whole.