16 October 2025

Mainpay Ltd v HMRC [2025] EWCA Civ 1290

The Court of Appeal has dismissed the appeal in Mainpay Ltd v HMRC.

Mainpay had reimbursed its workers’ travel expenses using benchmark scale rates and claimed they were deductible from the workers’ earnings because they were employed under a single overarching employment contract so that the workplace they attended for each separate assignment was a temporary workplace.

The Upper Tribunal had previously found that the contract was not overarching and the expenses were therefore not deductible. Before the Court of Appeal, Mainpay argued that as all the assignments were under a single contract, it was therefore a single employment under a “discontinuous contract of employment”.

The Court held that these were not however one employment for statutory purposes.  As such, the Court did not need to determine the second ground (which Ronan Magee argued for HMRC) that there was no entitlement to make such reimbursements using benchmark scale rates. The Court also made clear that although HMRC must show that the loss of tax was brought about by carelessness, they did not however (in a case about a failure to take proper advice) need to show what the result of taking proper advice would be.  As such, the FTT had applied the right test and the HMRC decisions were upheld.

The case is likely to be relevant to a number of current and upcoming Upper Tribunal appeals.

Sadiya Choudhury KC and Ronan Magee acted for HMRC.

You can read the judgment here.