INTERVIEW
schemes catered almost exclusively for people who wanted to own a bike, while the new wave of employees using bike share were left without those savings. That was the lightbulb moment.
The legislation was already there; it just had not caught up commercially with the way people were starting to cycle. Once we realised that, the question became: can we make salary sacrifice work for a Lime or Forest subscription in the same way it works for a traditional bike? That ultimately became CycleSaver.
You are billed as one of the only HMRC-compliant providers of salary-sacrifice subscriptions for bike hire. How difficult was it to make short-term rentals fit into a tax framework designed for long-term bike ownership? I am now, for my sins, fairly well versed in all things tax and salary sacrifice. Surprisingly, the legal and bureaucratic side was not the hardest part. The framework was already there. The first real challenge was convincing the bike-share
operators. Many of them are huge multinational businesses, and we were a start-up with a team of three asking them to create new products, integrate with us and ultimately trust us with their customers and brands. Getting those first operators to take a chance on us was a huge milestone. The second challenge has been changing the perception of what a Cycle to Work scheme should look like today. For more than 20 years, employers have understandably thought of Cycle to Work as one benefit for one purpose: helping employees buy a bike. But cycling has changed enormously. There is now a whole new cohort of people commuting by bike who do not necessarily want to own one at all. They are using Lime, Forest, Santander Cycles, Voi and other shared schemes as part of their everyday commute. So a big part of our job has been convincing employers that it does not have to be one or the other. A traditional Cycle to Work scheme and CycleSaver can sit side by side, serving two quite different groups of cyclists. For me, that is increasingly what a modern cycling benefit should look like.
Congratulations on your BikeBiz Award win last year. What did it mean for a tech-first micromobility platform to be recognised by the traditional cycling industry? Winning the BikeBiz Innovation of the Year Award was a huge moment for us. To have that recognised by the traditional cycling industry meant a lot. It felt like real validation that bike share is no longer a niche or overlooked part of cycling, but an increasingly mainstream way of getting people onto bikes. It has also undoubtedly helped commercially. As a young company, credibility matters, particularly when you are speaking to large employers, benefit providers and bike-share operators. Having that recognition behind us makes those conversations that little bit easier.
www.bikebiz.com
PHOTO: LIMEBIKE UK BY JAMIE HENDERSON
Many independent bike shops rely heavily on traditional Cycle to Work vouchers to drive high-ticket sales. Do you see CycleSaver as a direct competitor for the commuter’s budget, or does it serve a different demographic? Shared bikes mainly serve a different demographic. In our conversations with companies and benefits teams, we often describe CycleSaver as complementary to traditional Cycle to Work schemes. There are two distinct groups of riders. Some people will
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September 2026 | 29
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