VanInsurance

Can I Loan a Company Van to an Employee for Personal Use?

If you are a driver for a company which requires the use of vans, you may often want to use the company van for personal use in-between jobs. Perhaps you want to visit someone nearby, pick up some shopping or you just want to keep the van overnight at your house so you can save time in the morning. These kinds of perks for an employee will not only help the employee but could also help the company cut costs without having to sell the van and generally improve employee satisfaction and thus work productivity.

Changes to Insurance Policy

If you are a company owner and you want to give your employees the right to use a van for these purposes you should be able to do it without too much hassle. Firstly you must declare to your insurance holder that you are allowing employee's dual use of the van. Most van insurance policies with haulage usage, meaning that a van is driven by a third party, like the driver, will not include the personal use of the van as part of the policy. Van insurance which has carriage of own goods as its usage on the other hand will allow this to occur, but this type of policy can only be applied to businesses which own the items in a van.

So for delivery services which used vans this carriage of own goods usage will not apply and haulage usage will have to be put on their policy instead. Although a policy cover with haulage usually does not include the personal use of a van, if you talk to your insurer provider about tweaking the details of your van insurance they should be able to allow the van to be used for personal use and still be covered. This may increase your monthly premiums if it results in the van being driven more often and thus increasing the chances of it getting into an accident, but this depends on the insurer you are with.

Changes with HMRC

After you talk to your insurer provider about tweaking the insurance policy you will also have to talk to Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs or HMRC as it commonly known. This is because it likely that the tax status of your company van will change if you are allowing it to be used for personal reasons by your employees. To find out the details of what tax changes will occur you can contact HMRC either on the internet where they should have some information about company van use or you can email them or call them and see if you can get your answers this way.

After you have found out what tax changes will occur by allowing your employees to use company vans for personal use, you will have to make your decision about whether or not you feel it's worth doing. If you feel the benefits outweigh the disadvantages or you just want to keep your employee's happy then go for it and soon enough your workers will be able to use it a lot easily than they could do before. You should always make sure that you have responsible drivers if you are going to do this however. By allowing your employees to use the van for the personal use, they are likely to be driving more and thus potentially getting into an accident more often. So make sure you trust your van drivers 100% if you are going to allow them to use the company vans for personal use.

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