Have just discovered that due to a recent change in the law on sex discrimination, if a woman gets nursery vouchers by salary sacrifice then she continues to get them during her maternity period, since they're now classed as a benefit like a company car or gym membership, which a company can't take away because she's on maternity leave. However obviously she's not getting paid full salary for a lot of maternity, and if she only gets statutory maternity pay then after the first 6 weeks this drops to a set rate per week. Now the employer can't make deductions from this fixed rate, hence has to pay for the nursery vouchers themselves - and the law says they're not allowed to reclaim the money later.
You might be wondering what this has to do with the thread title, and why it's in the bike forum. Well I realised that buying a bike on the bike-to-work scheme must come under exactly the same rules as nursery vouchers as it's a very similar salary sacrifice benefit. The conclusion being that if you want a (almost) free bike and your company has a bike-to-work scheme then get pregnant and start a BTW purchase just before you go off on maternity leave. Your employer will end up paying for 90% of the bike directly.
Obviously not that useful to most on here (sorry chaps), and not particularly worth getting pregnant just to get a free bike. Would be interested to hear if anybody ever manages to get a bike this way though!