6 |
place where the duties are to be performed. Therefore, an employee cannot deduct the extra costs of having to travel to work by car even though the car is needed for work once he gets there. 16 |
18A.2.1.2 Necessarily |
In deciding whether an expense is incurred necessarily the courts began with an objective test. In Ricketts v Colquhoun17 Lord Blanesburgh said that the expense had to be one which each and every occupant of the particular office was necessarily obliged to incur. Thus, the necessity must emerge from the job rather than from the personal circumstances of the employee; as such, a Recorder travelling from home to court can deduct the expenses only if they would be incurred by any other person fulfilling the duties of that office which was not so. |
| However, this view, although making some sense in the context of a long—established statutory office with very particular duties, such as a Recorder, is inconsistent with the modern bargaining process under which the goals of an employment contract may be coloured by the interests of both employer and employee. This inevitably demands that more attention to be paid to the needs of the employees, particularly when individual contracts are being negotiated with senior employees.18 As two later decisions of the House of Lords show, in determining whether the expense would be incurred by each and every occupant of the office, it is now necessary to consider who could be appointed to hold the office. If the range of reasonable appointees is restricted, the test must be applied in relation to such potential appointees, and it is then necessary to ask whether each of these persons, if appointed, would have to incur the expense; if the answer is ‘yes’, then the expense is deductible notwithstanding that some other person, who would not be a suitable appointee, might not have to incur it (Owen v Pook).19 In an |