1 Pound Luncheon Voucher; Edenred

Luncheon Vouchers in the UK date to 1946, when the scheme was introduced to allow employers to subsidize workers' meals as a tax-exempt benefit — a concession that survived largely intact until HMRC significantly curtailed the relief in 2013, capping the exemption at 15p per day, a figure unchanged since 1989 and rendered absurd by inflation long before it was finally addressed. Edenred, the French-headquartered benefits company that acquired the Luncheon Voucher brand, continued issuing paper vouchers well after the tax incentive had largely collapsed, serving legacy contracts and sectors slow to migrate to electronic alternatives.

By 2018 the paper format was already a rarity in active use. Security fibres and a watermark on a luncheon voucher reflect how seriously fraud had been taken historically — counterfeit vouchers were a persistent problem through the 1970s and 1980s.