After some pushing, my employer has asked me to work out what it would require for them to set up and administer a bike salary sacrifice scheme. Apparently they looked into this a couple of years ago and decided that ‘the administrative time that would be absorbed in setting up and continuing to manage a scheme could not be justified’. My sense is that it’s a lot easier to set up a scheme like this now: it just involves registering the organization with http://www.cyclescheme.co.uk who then do all the hard work. Is that right?

It would be useful to have any thoughts from people who’ve been involved in running this sort of thing themselves. Ideally, I’d like to be able to take a basic outline of what’s involved back to the organization in order to show them that the administrative time required isn’t that great.

Thanks in advance for your time

Cyclescheme will do the work for you, but you’re then tied to the people who they work with – and since the shops have to pay CYclescheme a percentage of the sale price, youlre unlikely to get much of a discount.

You can do it yourself: buy a bike, reclaim the VAT from the taxman as per a capital expenditure, then deduct a set amount each month using the tax code provided for the purpose, just like pensions etc. Our employer chose the cyclescheme and our accountant was baffled as to why, as he reckons it’s not much work at all….

Thanks NBT that’s really useful. I think the problem we’ve got is that our account DOES think it’s a lot of work to run the scheme–and that’s the argument they’re using to not introduce it. I guess what I could do is present these two options (Cycle Scheme vs. in house) and see what they go for.