Chameleon Magazine

If you spent your morning laying bricks in horizontal sleet, driving a delivery van with a heater that gave up years ago, or working outside in weather that makes your fingers stop cooperating, spare a thought for a very different kind of hardship: HMRC staff working from home.

Yes, the same department that can chase you over a £4.20 tax discrepancy may have staff able to claim support for the additional costs of working from home. So while millions of taxpayers head out into the cold, pay for fuel, transport and lunches, some of the people collecting those taxes can stay at home and receive help with the extra cost of doing so.

Working from home used to sound like a perk. No commute, no train fares, no traffic jams and no standing on a freezing platform at six in the morning. Apparently, that was missing the real struggle. There’s the difficult decision over whether to turn the thermostat up another degree, the hazardous journey from the bedroom to the spare room and, naturally, the crushing disappointment of discovering your coffee has gone cold while you’re drafting somebody else’s tax demand.

Meanwhile, builders, delivery drivers, road workers, farmers and countless others are outside in every kind of weather, earning the wages they’re taxed on and then paying their own heating bills when they finally get home. There’s a wonderful irony in some of that money potentially helping to cover the home-working costs of the very department responsible for collecting it.

And that’s where taxpayers may reasonably start asking questions. Government offices already exist. They have desks, computers, electricity and heating, all paid for by the public. So if you’re already paying to heat the office, it’s fair to wonder why you should also help cover the cost of heating someone’s home because they aren’t using it.

So if you’re freezing on a scaffold, repairing a road in driving rain or scraping ice from a van before dawn, try not to complain too loudly. Somewhere, an HMRC worker may be sitting at home wondering whether to turn the thermostat up another degree.

After all, somebody has to pay for it.