Cycling UK Forum

I work for British Energy who operate 8 of the countries newest nuclear power stations. We pride ourselves as being a green electricity producer and play on this theme with the public. Slogans are banded about like "British Energy: Powering the low carbon generation".

http://www.british-energy.com

Despite this we don’t participate in the "Cycle to work" scheme. The message from the Chief Executive Bill Coley (an American by the way) is the staff should be concentrating on making the company more profitable by ensuring the power stations remain on load, lessening the need for other less environmentally friendly generators…coal/oil etc. Whilst I agree that nuclear is a clean energy producer as far as CO2 is concerned I find this policy of “looking after the large environmental issues only” a little worrying. Surely the planet is saved by everyone doing everything they can. It seems to me that we are environmentally friendly whilst it is convenient to do so…

It took the British Energy Board a year to make the decision that it would not participate in the scheme. The power stations (8) have around 650 staff working on site all living in the surrounding areas which a predominantly countryside based…great for cycling.

Despite significant interest in this scheme from employees it looks like British Energy employees will never see the benefit. However on the plus side it looks like we will be bought out soon by another company…lets hope they are a little more environmentally proactive.

I would be interested in hearing from people with information/links to details on “How to convince your employer”. This is a no-brainer decision. It would be great if we had a compiled list of facts and figures that we could use to try and convince sceptical employers…this would be incredibly useful.

My local NHS trust don't offer it either!

I work for a large company (17,000 staff) and we are VERY keen on Health and Safety. The bike scheme has been offered for the past two years and is being offered again this year. The management want to keep the staff happy and benefits like this are one way of doing it. We operate in a competitive environment and unhappy staff will soon start looking for jobs elsewhere.

The company have been surprised at the level of take-up - I think it was around 1% of staff in the first year, higher in the second.

It seems like Health and Safety is used as an excuse for not doing this, rather than a genuine reason.

I will try to find the info that we compiled and post it here.

One thing we did was to search the Sustrans website for route near our major offices and sites to show that there were safe routes available. Of course, lots of routes are safe, but to convince people who don't cycle we wanted something more official to back us up.

About take up, my company wouldn't do it for 1%- they told us recently that in some companies take up rates are as poor as 1% and so in the employee survey they are proposing more people than that will have to be interested (maybe 5%? maybe better? we don't know exactly) for them to go to the trouble of doing it.

my company wouldn't do it for 1%- they told us recently that in some companies take up rates are as poor as 1%

There are about 26m cars on the road in the UK
http://www.whatcar.com/news-article.aspx?NA=219239
so take off 1% and that would be 260,000 fewer cars - not a bad start!

The number/% is important as there are some start up costs, however the saving in employers NI contribution can help offset if you get enough take up. My employer are soon introducing it as a bundle with a whole load of tax efficient benefits for child care, health insurance etc). I assume this makes the administration of the scheme more streamlined. As fatbat says such benefits could help staff retention, employees health, as well as easing parking and ticking the environmental responsibility box.

The report that we sent in to the HR department can be found here under Cycling and Health - What's the evidence? It's the third report down from the top, and covers just about everything. We also sent them an email with the report summarised as HR probably didn't read it...

We also tried to show how it related to the company mission statement and general goals. We included a map of the main sites showing how close many of them were to National cycle network routes. The headquarters are moving in a few years to a site with very limited parking, and very near the NatCycleNet, so we tried to sell it on those grounds too.

Now we are chasing them. I don't know whether they will be convinced, but they have stopped saying that they won't do it for Health&Safety reasons at least.

Can you get in a lift with someone from senior management / board level and do an elevator pitch?

I'm always amazed how fast the collective HR backside gets in gear when something is sponsored from above them.

Good idea but there is no one of that level in my office- they are all at head office I think. Nor is there anyone with that sort of influence. We do have a few interested people who are trying to get the message across to people at that level, but it's not easy to see them personally, as we don't have someone interested who has an easy in.

http://www.pm.gov.uk/output/Page15858.asp
27 June 08
Petition to Government:
""We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to force all local authorities to take the lead on promoting cycling by implementing a Ride 2 Work scheme."
----
extract from Government response :
"Cycling England is now actively promoting the scheme to businesses and employers across the country.

However we have no plans to force local authorities to take part in the scheme, although many have chosen to do so and we hope many more employers both public and private will make the scheme available to their staff in the future.

It is acknowledged that there is still much work to do to bring about increases in cycling, but we believe that considerable progress is being made. Local authorities are clearly a key part of that delivery and we are sure they will continue to support improvements for cyclists within their many other local transport priorities."

...I've contacted my employer, and asked, but they're still reviewing this.

I wanted to know how many requests they'd had, and still awaiting the reply....here's hoping!

If you can contact everyone in the company and ask them to reply to you if they are interested, that I think could help. This is what we did- so we could tell them that the info and request were on behalf of more than 50 people, and that their reply would be sent to all the interested employees. I don't know if we will get the program in the end, but numbers help.

askeans wrote:Now don't get me wrong I think that cycle to work is a good scheme. But before we jump up and down and make this list of shame

This idea of a list of shame kind of annoys me... other than "shaming" companies (which as far as I'm aware take a lot to feel shame... I'm pretty sure a few words on a cycle forum aren't enough!) wouldn't it be better to have a list of advertising? Companies that run the scheme?

I've recently changed jobs and had the choice of two jobs, one had a cycle to work scheme and the other didn't... so obviously I picked the former.

I didn't ask this before but now think I should, is there somewhere where you can see all the companies that have taken up this scheme?

Or even that are just cycle friendly, ie have a shower and a place for bikes?

My current company didn't do cycle to work, I mithered them for months before they 'looked' in to it.

I alos tried encouraging other people but nobody seemed interested enough to even send an email to HR.

In the end it took over six months before they implemented it. I was the only person who bought a bike on it (about six weeks ago), now since my new shiny bike has appeared lots of people have been asking about it and annoyingly there are now over a dozen people applying for it.

Where were they when I needed them? Annoying...

Speshact wrote:

my company wouldn't do it for 1%- they told us recently that in some companies take up rates are as poor as 1%

There are about 26m cars on the road in the UK
http://www.whatcar.com/news-article.aspx?NA=219239
so take off 1% and that would be 260,000 fewer cars - not a bad start!

It doesn't neccessarily mean that there will be 260,000 fewer cars on the road.

We have the scheme and the majority of those who have purchased bikes including myself already cycle to work and have used the scheme to get a new bike at a considerable discount.