Being self employed this is not available to me.
Is there anything stopping someone else buying a bike,getting the discount
and flogging it to me for a fee on top?
I would get a bike cheap and someone would make a bit of money.
Depends on, what form of self-employed you are. If you operate as a company you definitely can have a bike to work scheme. You just set it up on behalf of your employee which is you.
Not really a good way of getting a bike cheap though.
We are a partnership,not a limited company.
There are better deals to be had on finance than on c2w IMO. it's not as good as it used to be plus the fact it's against the rules/law for someone else to what you suggest as the bike doesn't really belong to them.
zippykona,
What you need to understand is that Bike 2 Work is not some sort of special HP scheme. If you (and your partners) wanted to you could work this in 'your favour'.
Here is how is is supposed to work:
(1) The company buys a bike (note the COMPANY not the employee is the owner of the bike).
(2) The company lets you use the bike for travel to and from work (and possibly some personal use).
(3) This 'benefit' is exempt from tax.
(4) Optionally the company may charge you a fee for using the bike - and such fee can be sacrificed from "pretax earnings"
In reality what has happened is people have 'engineered' a scheme where the optional fee at (4) above happens to be 1/12th of the purchase cost, so it is attractive to both employees and employers.
If you are paying PAYE as per any other employee I think you could construct a scheme just like anyone else.
Even if you aren't treated like a normal employee then if the Partnership had the will (and you had a justification for cycling to work or on company business) then there would, to my understanding, be nothing to stop the Partnership providing bikes to you to do that.
Oh and when you consider point (1) above you wouldn't want to pay me to get a bike 2 work bike from my company and let you have it. [Even ignoring that doing so would be tax evasion]. There is never any guarantee that at the end of the 'scheme' the bike will be sold to the employee. I have heard of one company who after the first year, some financial difficulty and new management team decided that all the bike2work bikes on the balance sheet would be kept and used as 'pool bikes' for travelling around site. Even if you think that risk is low that the situation in terms of redundancy or the employee leaving is not always clear cut etc.
But the OP's problem is that he's NOT an employee - he's in a partnership.
Because the OP is a partner in a partnership he's not part of the PAYE scheme (which is only for employees - not partners or self-employed working as sole traders). Because he's not in PAYE he can't use the C2W scheme.
Therefore there is no way he can use C2W through his partnership. Just like I can't use it because I'm self-employed as a sole trader - I don't use PAYE either.
But I agree with highclimber's point - check out finance offers instead.
C2W less of a great deal anyway since it lost the VAT exemption last year. A half-price or heavily reduced new bike eg
http://www.chainreactioncycles.com/Models.aspx?ModelID=84316
is a better deal.
Is there anything stopping someone else buying a bike,getting the discount
and flogging it to me for a fee on top
as others have said, yes, the bike is the property of the company not the employee who sells it to you. Once the bike has finally become their property it is just a regular second hand bike like any other.
As others have said, if you have any form of control over your business just let the company buy the bike and use it (may need to 'hide' it in the accounts).
We are Ltd, so the company owns the bike - and I use it. No additional cost.
Paid for out of gross 🙂