As the recently departed Norman Tebbit would attest, there has long been a connection between bicycles and jobs, particularly for the working classes. It was at the 1981 Conservative party conference that he gave his famous speech describing how in the Thirties, his unemployed father had ‘got on his bike and looked for work and he kept looking ‘til he found it’.
Almost half a century later, the parameters may have changed but the fundamental association remains the same. Or it did. Plans reportedly being drawn up by Rachel Reeves ahead of the Budget this month aim to sharply reduce the tax benefits available under the Cycle to Work scheme.
No sum is too small to be the target of Labour’s class warfare
First introduced by Tony Blair in 1999, the scheme allows employees to save up to 42 per cent of the cost of a bicycle by purchasing it with an interest-free loan from their employer, with monthly repayments deducted before tax.
In 2019, the Tory government lifted the £1,000 cap on the cost of bicycles, as it had become clear that electric bikes and cargo bikes were far more expensive.
Since then, the scheme has only become more popular, with about 209,000 claimants recorded in 2023-24, according to the most recent data available, at a cost of £130 million in 2024-25.
Considering that Britain handed £57 million in aid to wealthy India last year and £8 million to our enemy China the year before, not to mention such wastefulness as the £500,000 spent on changing the colour and location of the dot in the government’s online logo, we are not talking about a huge sum of money.
Yet no sum is too small to be the target of Labour’s class warfare. Panicked by the parlous state of the nation’s finances and desperate for savings, and at the same time apparently gripped by the kind of socialist spite that we have come to recognise as par for the course, Rachel Reeves is planning to exclude anybody wishing to purchase a high-end ride.
A quotation from an unnamed ‘government figure’ to the Financial Times summed up the spirit of the thing. ‘Cycle to Work should be about helping ordinary commuters switch to greener travel, not giving tax breaks to high earners buying £4,000 e-bikes for weekend rides in the Surrey Hills,’ the official sneered. ‘Taxpayers shouldn’t be footing the bill for luxury leisure.’
While there are certainly some cyclists who have the gall to use their new bicycles for recreational purposes, presumably helping ease the burden on the NHS by enhancing their health and wellbeing, there are many others who are too unfit or live too far from work to manage without electric assistance.
Still others are hard-pressed parents who need to give their children a lift on the way to the office, requiring the use of a cargo bike. As the FT points out, ‘Good-quality bikes with electric assistance typically cost at least £2,000, while cargo bikes with electric assistance and seating for several children can cost £5,000 or more.’
What will these people do when the Reeves cap comes in? Either go into debt or use a less environmentally-friendly and healthy way to get around town. Unfair? Certainly. In the petty Labour mindset, however, fairness is measured by the damage it does to the middle classes rather than the help it gives to the poor.
In an ideal world, of course, the government would keep its nose out of our cycling habits altogether. If public spending was curbed and taxes slashed, we would all have more money in our pockets to spend on whichever bicycle we liked, while the country enjoyed actual growth.
Given that at least for the next four years, such sane economic policies are but a pipedream, the least Reeves could do would be to repress her tendency to target people like you and me and think – for once – what might be in the best interests of the country.
Never Again? How the West Betrayed the Jews and Itself, by Jake Wallis Simons, is out now.
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