Bringing up baby

I am a full-time employee for a mid-tier firm of accountants. I have been looking at the real-time information (RTI) rules in order to bring some of my clients up to speed but my research has given rise to queries about my own personal duties.

Although I am not in business myself my husband and I regularly engage the services of a babysitter.

Although I suspect that there are some babysitters who are in reality self-employed I am not entirely convinced that this would be the correct legal analysis at least in our case even if that would give us a convenient way out of our obligations under the PAYE code.

Several years back I raised this with HMRC and was told that we need not worry about PAYE at all as long as the weekly payments were below the Class 1 National Insurance...