Spoke to my HR department, and have been told that our firm will only do cyclescheme via Evans Cycles. And worse still, only during a one month window per year.

Anyone know why that might be? They won't discuss the matter, at all, and I'm curious as to what benefit they might get from limiting us to Evans….

Are you sure it's Cyclescheme they are using to provide the scheme?

Evans dont support Cyclescheme. They do their own version R2W Scheme.

At a guess I'd say tht your company has signed up to Evans scheme

Evans ride to work

As for the 1 month window each year, well I don't know but my company opens it up for 2 weeks at a time at seemingly random periods, so I guess there must be some reason somewhere, probably to compress the paperwork into a set time period, after all Evans may administer the scheme but your HR folks will still have to do a certain amount of paperwork to get the voucher to you,

Several shops do their own version of the scheme (Leisure Lakes is another one) which means you can only buy a bike from them.
The window is just to make HR's life a bit easier and hopefully restrict the number of people who actually take it up – God forbid that HR should actually do any work!

@ Steelfan.

That's what I was getting at, either that or they had implemented it for themselves.

I think the window is tax related.

Could be worse – lots of places use Halfords. Should be able to get a decent bike at Evans.

running the scheme in windows usually make it a little easier admin wise for HR and Payroll departments, especially for larger companies.

Likely that your company is signed up to Evans facilitation scheme, Ride2Work the idea being that Evans does a bit of the leg work for the company – hence bikes only to be sourced through Evans – we do a similar thing at CycleSurgery – called Tax Free Cycle.

Hope that helps.

Jim

I'd be happy with Evans, our HR monkeys told us it was Halfrauds or nothing, not sure if this is enforcable but the voucher I seem to remember had a Halfords logo on it (was a couple of years ago now).
We have a couple of months window each year but where it falls seems to vary, depending on how arsed they can be…

the justification for going with Halfords was "it lets people pop in over the weekend as they are on most high streets" when I pointed out the fact that you get piss poor service, choice and value for money unless you go for a Carrera or Broadman I was basically ignored, still I might fancy a broadman in the next couple of years…

Ahh, yes, of course. It is Ride2Work, not Cyclescheme. My bad.

I'll keep a close eye on the sale bikes at Evans, then. Hopefully a nice DH commuter bike will show up soon enough. 🙂

Thanks chaps!