In this land of fudge, arcane systems are created, in which dishonesty and parasitism thrive.
A nation gets the Parliament it deserves. Unwilling to modernise, and deluded in thinking it still is the best, we are saddled with a legislature that is feudal, powerless and fraudulent.
Another example: the Cycle to Work initiative, a typical Brownian monument of fudge creation that has produced a Mafia-style system where bicycle shops are asked to pay 10% protection money to unscrupulous middlemen, such as cyclescheme.co.uk, if they want to sell a bicycle to one of their own customers.
Velorution has always stood firm against this racket. We don’t accept vouchers from these dodgy operators and deal directly with employers.
The MPs could have used the boom times of the late nineties to clean the system and saved themselves from the present embarrassment. I hope that all independent cycle shops use the present boom and boycot the middlemen and clean up the system.
And yes, strictly speaking, there is a fraud behind most C2W transactions. The rules specify that a taxable benefit in kind arises if the bicycle is sold to the employee below market value. Please raise your hand if you have paid more than £10 for your bike after having paid for the loan.
Image by Michelle Nolan
My employer, for some reason, charged me 10 per cent of the value of the bike as the payoff. Bastards.
I agree that the C2W scheme is ludicrously bureaucratic, but I’m not sure it follows that we are a nation of fraudsters. A good example might be cycle insurance, the adminisatrion of which relies to a large extent on trust – to a far greater degree than for example car insurance. My understanding is that certain European countries are unable to offer it at all because of high levels of fraud. In terms of ‘benefit in kind’ tax evasion and the C2W scheme, since bicycles are a ‘kind of benefit’ for the whole of society and not just the rider, perhaps we should just let it pass…