My last employer supplied me with an ADSL line for remote support /development purposes for many years. Then they withdrew it on the grounds that I had my own broadband and, no, they were not going to provide any compensation for using my line for their work.

I only knew one person who managed to retain his company line. I think his argument was that he had no home broadband of his own.

This was with a "big name" in the industry. Almost by definition a not decent bean counter led employer.

Edited by awontroba (Fri 17-Jul-20 04:35:28)

In reply to a post by awontroba:

My last employer supplied me with an ADSL line for remote support /development purposes for many years. Then they withdrew it on the grounds that I had my own broadband and, no, they were not going to provide any compensation for using my line for their work.

I work for a very large global IT company, and we stopped paying for, or towards, home broadband connections in 2005 in every country. Management said that broadband was no longer special and only used for business, the majority of usage was turning out to be domestic.

This Covid pandemic means majority are now home working, but the UK ISPs have been great, and I've not heard of anyone being told "this domestic service is not for home working".

To many ISPs "Home working" is seen as different to running a business at home.

Edited by jchamier (Fri 17-Jul-20 07:49:43)

In addition if an employer is providing the connection and it is used for any reasonable amount of personal use then I believe it would be a taxable benefit which just complicates things further for most people. My employer is generally looking at it from the point of view that they don't pay travel expenses to get to the office so the amount of money most people save from not travelling will cover their broadband costs (which they probably aren't paying more for anyway) - if they don't have broadband at home then they would have to go to the office to work (or would have been furloughed before the lockdown restrictions were largely lifted).

In reply to a post by ian72:

In addition if an employer is providing the connection and it is used for any reasonable amount of personal use then I believe it would be a taxable benefit which just complicates things further for most people. My employer is generally looking at it from the point of view that they don't pay travel expenses to get to the office so the amount of money most people save from not travelling will cover their broadband costs (which they probably aren't paying more for anyway) - if they don't have broadband at home then they would have to go to the office to work (or would have been furloughed before the lockdown restrictions were largely lifted).

So in theory the other side of the coin is that if you are using your personal internet connection for work matters you should be able to offset part of the cost of the connection against your income tax.

Nope. From HMRC (my bold):

You may be able to claim tax relief for some of the bills you have to pay because you have to work at home on a regular basis. You cannot claim tax relief if you choose to work from home.

You can only claim for things to do with your work, for example, business telephone calls or the extra cost of gas and electricity for your work area.

You cannot claim for things that you use for both private and business use, for example, rent or broadband access

EDIT : Also this:

In reference to www.contracteye.co.uk/reclaim-broadband-expenses.shtml:

“If the broadband connection is paid for by the company and is provided at the employees/directors home then, a full deduction for the cost is allowed when calculating the corporation tax due for the year.

“Provided that any personal use of that connection is ‘insignificant’, no benefit in kind issues arise for the individual.

“However, if the broadband connection is used for a mixture of business and personal use then a benefit in kind will apply with the full amount paid by the company becoming taxable on the individual.”

Edited by ian72 (Fri 17-Jul-20 10:00:36)

In reply to a post by GonePostal:

So in theory the other side of the coin is that if you are using your personal internet connection for work matters you should be able to offset part of the cost of the connection against your income tax.

Nope. Some self employed people have been able to do similar, but not those employed by larger corporations.

It ended up with some silly situations of having "corporate" broadband on a separate Openreach line installed into the bedroom acting as an office, when the family had the original Openreach line with a separate service. This meant the company paying for a business phone line that was never carrying calls, due to the use of mobile phone, and laptop calling solutions.

This is data downloading for personal work so no work not of relevance here. Having searched around it looks like the smaller fibre high speed broadband companies don't offer anything in my area.