Travel-related benefits for Charity employees

Good employees are very hard to hire and keep. In the charity sector, good fundraisers are in short supply and charities need to keep the best ones, once recruited.

One of the options is to offer travel-related benefits to your employees. There is no better time to offer your employees the cycle-to-work scheme than now. Our very own Chris Froome has made history on Sunday by winning the tour of Spain, La Vuelta, to become the first rider to win La Vuelta back to back with the Tour de France. The stock for cycling is going to go up, and more and more people are likely going to be influenced to take up cycling in UK.

Cycle-to-work is a simple no frills scheme and its available to charities of all sizes.  For employees to take advantage of this tax-free benefit, an employer can simply buy a cycle and cyclists’ safety equipment and loan it to an employee for qualifying journeys to work. This arrangement means that the employee's normal salary arrangements are not affected and is sometimes referred to as a ‘salary plus’ arrangement. However, if the employer wants to recover the cost of providing the cycle and safety equipment loaned to the employee, this could be done through a salary sacrifice arrangement. In most cases there is no tax benefit for the charity however, employee retention is the key reason for offering this.

Cycling has overtaken Golf in the popularity stakes. Last year Financial Times reported that cycling has beaten golf in the new world of networking. Charity fundraisers may have the opportunity to network and potentially organise charity cycling events for fundraising.

For more advice, contact our partner Suda Ratnam on 020 8418 2681 or suda.ratnam@raffingers.co.uk

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