In short, as management consultants, we at Emmerson Hill Associates have been doing things “people or organisations couldn’t do themselves, didn’t wish to do themselves or simply didn’t have the time to do themselves”. The time has arrived for us to hang up the clipboards and calculators and retire gracefully. In short supply, and ever more challenging, are the skills necessary to prepare car cost forecasts in a market which is becoming ever more complex, with the introduction of new hybrid, electric powered and fuel efficient car models, and such rapid changes to the values of older more polluting cars. A reasonable guide to the tax status of car costs for business use are the Approved Mileage Allowance Payments (AMAPs) set out by HMRC which are (at time of writing) 45p/mile for the first 10,000 annual business miles, and 25p/mile for all annual business miles above this figure. Shame that AMAP rates are not regularly reviewed by HMRC, as they have remained more or less static for years. Several members of our team are now concentrating their expertise not on car costs but dealing with the costs of travel – increasingly a real problem with our creaky infrastructure and overloaded road system, badly designed junctions and poor traffic light programming, emanating from clueless road planners who never seem to drive cars or use public transport. The cost of cars is one thing but the real cost of travel, including that of getting around by coach, rail or air, is quite another challenge, with alternative means of transport often being so time consuming and expensive, as the report provided illustrates.
