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@ex-pat_scot
I used the Halfords scheme to get my Brompton.
Other colleagues have used it to get Cannondale, and even a Focus from Wibble.
You have to ring up the Halfords helpline and ask them to supply the particular bike / make. They then subcontract to LBS (in my case York Cycleworks) who liaise with the mfr / importer.
NB they used to be able to deal with Wibble and One One / Planet X. No longer do so, as I understand they charged 10% to the shop for the privilege, and understandably PX and Wibble have told them where to stick their business.
Other shops do accept the Halfords vouchers direct: I believe Leisure Lakes, BikeHut, CycleRepublic and Pearsons all do. Can't remember whether Merlin cycles do.
My scheme is a 3 year one so I have one year remaining before I can sign up again. I'll definitely be doing it.
Plan A is to find a bike that Halfords can't source (thoughts turning towards a custom build Kinesis Convert), so they subcontract to my friendly LBS. I then use LBS to buy £1000 worth of kit, under the "flag of convenience" of the C2W scheme.
Plan B is Plan A plus getting them to refund the value of the frame (ie technically ordering a "Kinesis" or whatever) plus lots of other bits, but them booking the frame into stock so I get the whole £1000 to spend on bits. (and for bonus, they've just done a full SRAM red groupset for my colleague for £999. That would be a fantastic upgrade to existing road bike)
Plan C is a simple - buy the Boardman Carbon
Plan D is plan C but sell F&F, use the kit to replace old 7 speed kit on my tasty Trek 5900, and eBay the old kit to retro geeks. Should work out cost-neutral.
Plan E is a simple f@ck it again but blow the full £1000 on a fancy fixie - probably something like Pearson Touche.
Apart from the obvious cost saving, the monthly salary deduction appeals (as it doesn't appear on the credit card as another "what the hell have you spent our money on?" item).
Plan B appeals, as senior management's super-sensitive spider senses are good on spotting new bikes but not so good at replacement kit.
Plan D appeals as it's frugal and allows me to upgrade at little / no cost.
Getting back on topic for a second, I notice that the "Carrera" carbon frames do seem to be re-badged far Eastern factory output, and none the worse for that. The £1000 Carrera TT special I saw in Halfords last month seemed to be very similar to another frame.
In general, there's a huge amount of cr@p written about carbon frames - even more than the mystical steel BS from 20 years ago when I first started road biking.
Yes- there are different grades of carbon. There are different fibres, different ratios of fibre to resin, different manufacturing options (vacuum molding, Trek's OCLV as an example).
BUT far more important than the grade of carbon used are 2 key things.
That's what Trek et al spend their research dollar on.
But they then send out their designs to far-eastern factories to be built in batches. At which point, those factories can churn them out by the thousand, and re-badge the excess.
I'm not saying that all factories are churning out frames for rebadging, nor that all high-end manufacturers get their stuff built overseas, but you can certainly see striking similarities...