A proposed reintroduction of a spending cap on the Cycle to Work scheme is doing the rounds today, seemingly part of the government’s plan to regain some street cred with the upcoming Autumn Budget. A quote directly from Labour HQ supplied to the FT talks of removing “tax breaks for high earners riding £4,000 e-bikes in the Surrey Hills”… which, as anyone who has invested in an electric bike to replace a car will know, is about as ignorant as it is possible to get when it comes to the potential benefits of e-bikes.

As I’m writing this in bewilderment and itching to head out for a quick lunchtime bike ride (admittedly on a machine worth around £6,000, that I paid a heavily discounted rate for on a monthly salary sacrifice through the Cycle to Work scheme), I haven’t quite arrived at a perfectly snappy way to demonstrate how absurd that dog whistle is, but the Green Party councillor Jack Lenox’s stab at it on his Threads account is around about what I was going for:

“A £4,000 e-bike replaces a £35,000 car. An e-bike saves the NHS £1,400/year. An e-bike cuts emissions immediately. Yet Rachel Reeves wants to limit the cycle to work scheme while preserving tax breaks for £60,000 Teslas? Make it make sense.”

To put it another way (getting there, still not quite there), the current Band 1 grant saving of up to £3,750 on an electric car worth £37,000 or less is potentially going to be more than the entire price of a bike that the government now considers too expensive to foot a tax break bill for. A bike that takes up far less space than any car, is far less likely to kill or maim in the hands of the wrong rider, and could potentially fit as many groceries on it as the average boot in an SUV, if that bike is a sufficiently equipped electric cargo bike.

Like the occasional vote-winning cuts to beer duty and seemingly continuous freezes to fuel duty to save fossil fuel vehicle drivers a few pennies per litre at the pumps (remarkably there’s talk of the latter being unfrozen for the first time in years), removing genuinely useful tax breaks on bikes is just low-hanging fruit, and any money saved will be an absolute drop in the ocean.

Maybe there’s some merit in making damn sure a cheeky hedge fund manager can’t buy a £10,000 race bike at a discounted rate when he/she has no intention of using that bike to get to work and back – but without a lot of bureaucracy, that saving won’t even come close to making up for the amount society could benefit from a family buying a discounted cargo bike instead of a car, or even instead of a second car. I’m sure there are more hobby cyclists taking advantage of the scheme than people looking to buy higher end utility bikes right now, but disincentivising the latter while the concept of using an e-bike instead of a car for some journeys is in its infancy in the UK will take us firmly back to square one.

With the Conservative party’s Boris-influenced talk of a “new golden age of cycling” firmly behind us, and various Reform UK MPs and councillors reliably popping up with anti-cycling rhetoric here and there, at least the right side of the UK’s political spectrum spark discussions about cycling. The ridiculous “£4,000 e-bikes in the Surrey Hills” comment suggests this government hasn’t even considered cycling as a transport option in the first place.