I am a self-employed kitchen fitter working away from home and tend to sleep in my van to save on accommodation bills. Rather than keep detailed records of food bills etc my inclination is to claim (per night) 75% of the official HMRC subsistence allowances for (employed) lorry drivers as HMRC’s Employment Income manual at EIM66130 allows where drivers use their sleeper cabs overnight. Does this seem reasonable?

Arthur Weller replies:
The HMRC guidance at EIM66130 that you refer to is talking about employed lorry drivers, as you yourself have noted. You are better off looking at HMRC’s Business Income manual at BIM47705 (expenditure on meals and accommodation) and BIM37670, which talks about a self-employed trader. It states there: ‘Where a business trip by a trader necessitates one or more nights away from home, the hotel accommodation and reasonable costs of overnight subsistence are deductible...the reasonable costs of meals taken in conjunction with overnight accommodation are allowable, whether or not paid on the same bill. The same treatment may be extended to traders who do not use hotels, for example, self-employed long-distance lorry drivers who spend the night in their cabs rather than take overnight accommodation.’