Morning Ireland

On your bike and save money

by Paul Ferris

Recently, everyone seems to be talking about going for a run or a cycle so Morning Ireland decided to see if it was just us and our friends turning into fitness fanatics, or if it was a bigger phenomenon.

When I contacted running and cycling clubs around the country, our suspicions were confirmed with large increases in interest in both activities.

The cyclists I spoke to all mentioned the cycle to work scheme as giving a boost to the sport. And as today, June 22nd, is National Cycle to School and Work Day, it seemed as good a time as any to look at the scheme in more detail.

The immediate problem was that no one could tell us how many people have taken advantage of the scheme, or how much it has cost.

Basically, the cycle to work scheme allows you to buy a bike and write off the cost of it against income tax, PRSI, the Universal Social Charge etc so, depending on how much you earn, you can cut your tax bill by up to half the cost of the bike -- in other words, a 500 euro bike could end up costing you less than 250 euro.

But your employer has to facilitate the scheme and it's up to employers to police it and only apply the tax relief to you if you actually bought a bike. Revenue told us the scheme was designed like this to keep it as simple as possible and to reduce administration, but it does mean no one compiles figures relating to the scheme.

So, in the absence of any centrally compiled figures, we decided to try to get an idea of the take-up ourselves by contacting some of the big employers in both the public and private sector.

Some didn't want to tell us, but others didn't mind sharing the information. In AIB for example, 1,000 of their 20,000 employees -- or five per cent of staff -- have taken advantage of it; at technology company EMC in Cork, 18 per cent of staff have taken it up; at Citigroup, 15 per cent of staff; and Tesco, which only really got involved this year, already has 350 employees who have signed up. Here in RTÉ, 258 people have availed of it (including myself and Cathal Mac Coille) -- that's around 12 per cent of staff. In the HSE, more than 5,000 people have used the scheme.

I also contacted some of the Government Departments to get an idea of numbers, including Communications, Energy and Natural Resources (33 out of 280 staff members), Finance (58 out of approx 600), Revenue itself (550 out of 6,058), Health (45 out of 480) and Transport (55 out of around 550). That works out at roughly between nine and 12 per cent of employees in Government departments contacted who had taken advantage of the scheme.

Those figures match those given to me by James Leahy who runs a company called Bike To Work which basically facilitates the scheme by making it easier for companies to deal with the large number of bike shops around the country. He says that, in companies they deal with, an average of about 10 to 12 per cent of employees avail of the scheme.

Bike shop owners are the obvious big beneficiaries and a number of people in the industry are now in the process of setting up an association to represent it and lobby on its behalf and make sure the scheme isn't cut.

Jimmy Stagg, who owns Staggs Cycle in Lucan, is involved in the new association. He says they're in the process of trying to compile exact figures but they already have a rough idea of how beneficial it's been and estimate somewhere between 650 and 900 jobs have been created as a result of it. He has doubled his own staff from three to six.

Jimmy also says that at least 30 new bike shops have opened around the country as a result of the scheme, so it seems that at least one industry is certainly booming here at the moment!

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