Let’s imagine you still have to go into work, whatever the current Covid status. Many people do: care workers, cleaners, retail staff, frontline key workers of all descriptions.
If you’re on the minimum wage, the cost of that journey is a very large part of your ‘how do I make ends meet?’ calculations.
Quite often, whether you’ve found a job cleaning trams or stacking Christmas puddings in a supermarket, your accommodation won’t be just round the corner. And if you can’t afford a car (a third of South Yorkshire households are carless) you’ll have to weigh up the cost of public transport.
A monthly ticket will knock you back £54 if you restrict yourself to one bus company in Sheffield, £65 if you need to use several bus operators and the tram, or £88 if you need to cross into Rotherham, Barnsley or Doncaster.
Mechanic explaining problems to a bike commuter
We know what you’re thinking: why not use the Cycle to Work scheme? Instead of paying £54 (or more) for a boring bus journey, you could ask your employer for a really nice £800 bike, £100 worth of kit and end up paying £51 a month instead, and after a year, nothing! A no-brainer, surely?
Except, like many care workers, cleaners, and retail staff, you can’t.
That’s because you can only get the the advertised 25-39% discounts of the Cycle to Work scheme if you earn more than the minimum wage. The low paid are effectively excluded from a national scheme that allows someone on a salary of £50,000 to save £2,500 on the cost of the Pinarello road bike they’ve picked up to nip in to the office for a sales meeting.
Many low paid workers have made those calculations about bus tickets and bikes in Sheffield, and fully understand the health and environmental benefits of cycling to work, just like everyone else. But they can’t access that handy discount many of us get for ouir commuter bikes, so they usually get something cheap, which is hard to ride, and breaks down all the time. And then maybe they’ll just go back to paying 20% of their monthly income on a bus ticket.
We think it’s time for some levelling up in cycle commuting too.