Tax concessions urged to help commuters go the extra mile …

Workers should be given tax breaks to share cars as part of reforms to encourage more people to commute long distances, ministers have been told.

Employers should be able to issue pre-tax travel vouchers to staff taking part in ride-sharing schemes under proposals to ease the cost of commuting, according to the proposals.

Policy Exchange, the right-of-centre think tank, said that ministers should also consider giving workers access to pay-as-you-travel car hire schemes, cut-price part-time rail season tickets and hail-and-ride minibus services.

The recommendations came as figures showed that large numbers of people were struggling to find jobs because of the expense of commuting long distances, particularly outside southeast England.

Over the past decade 12 jobs have been created in cities in the south for every one created in cities across the rest of Britain, researchers found.

The study analysed employment opportunities around seven “city regions” outside the southeast — Bristol, Nottingham, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, the West Midlands, and Tyneside.

It found that people living in a third of local authorities within these regions had no “major employment” sites — such as large city centres — within a 20-minute commute. These included towns such as Oldham, Rochdale, Mansfield, Barnsley, Doncaster and Rotherham.

The report said adults needed greater access to cut-price travel to enable them to commute for longer distances.

Damian Hind, who wrote the report, said: “Commuting can be expensive and tiring, but longer commutes can hugely increase people’s job prospects. The government needs to make transport cheaper so people can commute further and more efficiently so that they can get to work faster. Reducing the costs associated with longer commutes is one of the best ways to boost employment and wages.”

The report recommended setting up tax breaks for ride-sharing schemes similar to those established for childcare — when the cost of vouchers worth a fixed value are taken from an employee’s salary before income tax and national insurance are deducted.

Employers could issue staff with a pre-paid credit card to be used for fuel and vehicle maintenance if they agreed to share vehicles with other workers, “potentially saving people hundreds of pounds a year”, the study said.

It also proposed the extension of schemes such as the one run by Croydon council, in south London, which allows staff to hire a pay-as-you-go Zipcar to get to work at a reduced rate. The vehicles are given over exclusively to council employees during traditional working hours before becoming available to the public at other times.

Other ideas included the introduction of part-time season tickets, which would allow commuters to buy a cheap annual rail card if they only planned to use it for two or three days a week. Currently, rail cards cost the same irrespective of the number of journeys actually taken — making them largely pointless for part-time workers.

 

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