Brown ditches home-computer loan scheme

[Bob Crabtree]

Yesterday's budget blew out of the water the Department of Trade and Industry's Home Computer Initiatives - schemes (described as loans) that, effectively, let companies sell PCs to their employees for under 60 per cent of the cost price.

After April 6, tax of £200 or more (plus national insurance payments) will be levied on any new scheme. On the up side, that does mean there is still a small window of opportunity for new schemes to be put in place before April 6.

There's lots more info in this HEXUS.headline.

Check it out and tell us your experiences of HCI - was it a clunker or something that had real benefits to the nation?

[RedPutty]

Quite a few people bought these at my last company, their scheme had only HP computers which were overpriced a bit, however with the deal you ended up getting them a bit cheaper than you could buy them for yourself and also you effectively got interest free credit too.

Its mental that one govt dept is taxing incentives by another. Of course things like tax credits already made it plainly obvious what kind of money games they want to play.

[schmunk]

I work with people that have been selling this to employers - they weren't best pleased by this news...

They had a fair amount of success with companies where people didn't use PCs in their day-to-day jobs, with a take-up of up to 80% in several large companies.

There is still a benefit in salary-sacrifice home computers, as you (and your employer) still won't pay NIC (and possibly VAT) but the tax sweetener's gone now.