Urgent warning for anyone who has or is about to sign up to Cycle to Work

I think that if you're a higher rate tax payer, and you buy a bike for a grand, then you still stand to save between £250 and £400...

But yeah, for those earning a regular salary and buying a bike over £500 it seems like you could get fucked over.

It's also unclear what happens if you used the £1,000 allowance to buy a bike significantly over that sum, presumably you'd only pay 25% on the first £1,000 of the bike (that which your company owns)... otherwise you'd be in for a really nasty surprise when your finance director tells you he wants 25% of a £2k bike that you part-bought on the scheme.

I didn't think you could buy anything over a grand on the scheme. As I understood it, the scheme was only for bikes under £1000. That was why all the standard-build Chris Boardman bikes were priced at just under a grand, to catch the top end of the cycle to work people.

You were never meant to be able to buy a bike over a grand.
You shouldn't have been able to add your own cash to the £1k voucher limit as you hire the bike from your employer and you can't hire something that you own part of.
The reason the limit was set at a grand was that that should be more than enough to buy a very decent commuter bike and the limit was placed to stop people buying bikes for competition.
It's just another part of the scheme that was never implemented properly.