Cycle to work scheme

Here’s the situation regarding my Cycle to work scheme application. It’s not happening.

Last September according to my emails I asked the company to register on the scheme so I could have a winter commuter as my Ridgeback had gone to the great towpath in the sky and I certainly wasn’t going to kill my Giant road Bike or my Marin MTB over a winter of hard usage.

I kept on at them and they were always “in the process” of doing it. But nothing ever happened. I had to press wifey’s Rockhopper in to service to see me through last winter. She wasn’t too happy!

I still kept on at them, and eventually back in March they actually registered on the scheme and told me to do the necessary. Which I did expecting things to happen very quickly from there. After a while I rang the scheme and asked where we were with my application and they said they’d sent the invoice to my company but they hadn’t paid. I spoke to the person organising it, a senior person at my company and he said the email with the invoice was corrupt and he couldn’t read it, so I got the scheme to email another one and that was fine. They still didn’t pay it for reasons (nothing to do with me) that it wouldn’t be appropriate to go in to here.

I reached the point this week with yet more promises and no bike that I decided that there was a very real chance that I probably wouldn’t have a bike for next winter and this was never going to happen. There would be always reasons why they couldn’t pay the invoice to the scheme.

So, where does that leave me? Winter bikeless for a start. But it’s still spring and I can sort something out myself. More to revealed about that in due course.

All in all very disappointing. I just wish I hadn’t asked the company to join in the first place as it is now clear that certain people didn’t want it and were always going to put as many obstacles in the way to prevent any one from ever getting a bike.

It’s not as though it was a great amount of money in the business sense, or that it takes a huge amount of admin to do. A pretty sad state of affairs really.