Sam Page
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Rant incoming.

People and behaviour2 min readSam Page

HMRC treats staff events like a taxable luxury.

In reality, they are fundamental to business and economic success.

Given it's the festive season, I was looking at the "annual event" exemption rules recently, and the number feels stuck in the past.

The rules are pretty clear:

  • It has to be an annual social event (like a Christmas party or summer BBQ).
  • It has to be open to everyone.
  • The cost must be £150 or less per head (including VAT) - for the year.

If you tick those boxes, employees don’t pay tax on it and the business doesn’t pay NI.

But if you go a penny over? The whole lot becomes taxable.

Now, I know how a lot of companies get around this.

They dress it up as "work”.

You book a meeting room, force the team to sit through four hours of PowerPoint slides, and suddenly the dinner or the hotel becomes a valid business expense rather than "entertainment".

But I don’t want to do that.

We want to treat the team.

We want to give them time that isn’t focused on work, without them, or us, being penalised for it.

It blows my mind that the threshold is still this low. It puts so many companies off doing the "proper" version of these events. They scale back, or they cancel, or they resort to the "fake conference" tactic.

I guess what really frustrates me is that we are living in a time where we are more digitally connected than ever, but often feel further apart as people.

I love tech. I’ve built my life around it.
But you can’t build culture just over Slack.

You need to be in a room. You need to see the whites of people’s eyes. You need to share a meal and just be humans together, without a slide deck in the background.

That is where trust, excitement and energy is built.

And not to mention the cost of hiring new people, versus retention.

If the government wants growth, they need to understand that connection drives it.

Closer teams build better businesses. They deliver better results.

Growing businesse pays back way more to the economy in the long run than a bit of tax on a staff party.

Anyone else feel the same!?

First published on LinkedIn.

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GEThttps://sam-page.com/thinking/rant-incoming.mdtext/markdown; charset=utf-8

---
title: "Rant incoming."
url: https://sam-page.com/thinking/rant-incoming
date: 2025-12-17
author: Sam Page
type: Post or article
categories: [People and behaviour]
reading_time: 2 min
summary: "HMRC treats staff events like a taxable luxury."
first_published: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn%3Ali%3Ashare%3A7407021059998175232
---

# Rant incoming.

HMRC treats staff events like a taxable luxury.

![](https://sam-page.com/img/thinking/rant-incoming-li1.webp)

In reality, they are fundamental to business and economic success.

Given it's the festive season, I was looking at the "annual event" exemption rules recently, and the number feels stuck in the past.

The rules are pretty clear:

* It has to be an annual social event (like a Christmas party or summer BBQ).  
* It has to be open to everyone.  
* The cost must be £150 or less per head (including VAT) - for the year.

If you tick those boxes, employees don’t pay tax on it and the business doesn’t pay NI.

But if you go a penny over? The whole lot becomes taxable.

Now, I know how a lot of companies get around this.

They dress it up as "work”.

You book a meeting room, force the team to sit through four hours of PowerPoint slides, and suddenly the dinner or the hotel becomes a valid business expense rather than "entertainment".

But I don’t want to do that.

We want to treat the team.

We want to give them time that isn’t focused on work, without them, or us, being penalised for it.

It blows my mind that the threshold is still this low. It puts so many companies off doing the "proper" version of these events. They scale back, or they cancel, or they resort to the "fake conference" tactic.

I guess what really frustrates me is that we are living in a time where we are more digitally connected than ever, but often feel further apart as people.

I love tech. I’ve built my life around it.  
But you can’t build culture just over Slack.

You need to be in a room. You need to see the whites of people’s eyes. You need to share a meal and just be humans together, without a slide deck in the background.

That is where trust, excitement and energy is built.

And not to mention the cost of hiring new people, versus retention.

If the government wants growth, they need to understand that connection drives it.

Closer teams build better businesses. They deliver better results.

Growing businesse pays back way more to the economy in the long run than a bit of tax on a staff party.

Anyone else feel the same!?