hidden miles are travelled each year and often overlooked by employers and employees alike. In the public sector, evidence indicates that grey fleet makes up around 57% of total road mileage. Across the whole sector, this could add up to as much as 1.4 billion miles every year!

The management of grey fleet travel plays an important part in supporting three key policy areas of health and safety, environmental sustainability and financial efficiency. It is about removing unnecessary mileage and transferring necessary travel to more environmentally efficient and cost effective alternatives like public transport and hire cars, as well as minimising the risk where employees do use grey fleet for work.

How you can tackle grey fleet
Any department or authority can take some steps to addressing grey fleet through:
• Presenting the impacts of grey fleet travel to senior managers and highlighting potential
benefits, including cost savings, to encourage their support for action;
• Setting Travel Policy to restrict unnecessary grey fleet usage and promote other forms of transport where these offer better value for money or lower environmental impact;
• Gathering management information on travel in private vehicles to help comply with duty of care legislation and prompt employees to justify the requirement to use their own car.

The OGC has produced a paper on Grey Fleet Best Practice and a Sample Business Case that may be useful in presenting the issues to senior managers. There are also several other Case Studies explaining what has already been done in this area and providing suggestions for other organisations. If you wish to register your interest in the work being done on grey fleet, please contact the OGC Service Desk on 0845 000 4999 or visit the NHS PASA website.

How North Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust tackled grey fleet
North Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust was established as a combined hospital and community Trust on 1st April 2001 and achieved Foundation Status on 1st May 2007. The Trust operates all NHS hospitals in Scunthorpe, Grimsby and Goole and currently employs approximately 6,000 people.

Running three hospitals, separated by considerable distances, poses a significant service
delivery challenge. It is the role of Jug Johal, Transport Manager at the Trust, to manage travel requirements across the organisation.

In the 2006/07 financial year:
• 1,155 employees in the Trust submitted claims for grey fleet mileage
• 1.4 million grey fleet miles were claimed, an average of 1,175 miles per employee
• grey fleet cost the Trust in excess of £0.75 million in mileage claims.

Action timeline

Travel review
In 2006/07 the Trust initiated a review of its travel strategy, with a goal to promote sustainable travel by increasing travel choice and reducing the need to travel.
Support was enlisted from the Energy Saving Trust, in the form of a free green fleet review and the development of an action plan of recommendations for moving the project forward.

The Trust set itself a target to reduce spend on grey fleet mileage by £350,000 over a three year period.

Implementation approach
The Trust pursued a number of initiatives for encouraging employees to use alternative forms of travel to grey fleet. These included:
• Introduction of a shuttle bus service in September 2007 to transport staff between the three hospital sites in North East Lincolnshire, Goole and Scunthorpe. This has been highly
successful in tackling grey fleet and, in the first seven months of operation, staff had made 6,557 bookings, saving nearly 200,000 grey fleet miles
• Launch of a new Courtesy Car Service in July 2006 to reduce the number of taxis used to transport samples, equipment and doctors. The vehicle completed over 3,000 journeys
(60,000 miles) in it first year, of which 57 were blue light journeys
• Promotion of the lease car scheme, by marketing the benefits to employees and offering
lease cars to all eligible employees currently using their own car for business travel
• Creation of a ‘greener’ pool car fleet, by introducing lower-emitting diesel Vauxhall Corsas and diesel Vauxhall Combo vans onto the owned fleet
• Development of a best practice occupational road risk policy to put driver health and safety in the spotlight, and the introduction of driver handbooks, safety checks and driver training
• Installation of videoconference equipment and active promotion of the new facilities to all employees
• Encouragement of use of public transport when employees are attending conferences,
events and meetings.

Benefits achieved
In the seven months between September 2007 and March 2008, North Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Trust used its shuttle bus to reduce grey fleet mileage by almost 200,000 miles.

This resulted in a 14% drop in grey fleet mileage in the financial year 2007/08, as compared with the previous year.

Emissions Reduction
The Trust is aiming to reduce its carbon emissions from road transport by 18% over the next three years. Already, the impact of the 14% reduction in grey fleet mileage has helped cut carbon emissions by around 70 tonnes as compared with the previous year (based on Defra guidance 2006).

Health & Safety Benefit
Best practice occupational road risk policy, driver handbooks, safety checks and driver training have all been introduced to support improved management of employee health and safety.

Similarly, the movement of employees from their own vehicles to a shuttle bus and to pool and lease cars helps ensure vehicles used for business journeys have up-to-date safety features and a managed service history.

Direct Cost Saving
A target has been set to reduce grey fleet expenditure by £350,000 over a three year period. Based on shuttle bus savings in the first seven months of £46,000 and taxi savings of £20,000, the Trust has already saved £66,000 on a part-year implementation programme.

Jug comments that, “NHS funding is limited so the financial savings that are accruing can be reinvested into services to improve patient care, therefore saving lives and maintaining the health of the community”.

Reputational Benefit
In light of all of these achievements, North Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust was named winner in the grey fleet category at the 2007 Energy Saving Trust Fleet Hero Awards and Jug Johal was named fleet manager of the year in the sub-100 vehicle category at the 2008 Fleet News Awards.

Key success criteria – how this NHS Trust made it work

Senior-level support
Senior management support is vital for the success of grey fleet policy changes. The Chief Executive and Executive Team at North Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust have been very supportive of the strategy for reducing business mileage and this has set a positive example for the rest of the organisation.

Communication and data collection
The Trust has used good communication and robust data collection to support implementation of the changes to grey fleet management. This has included:
• Establishment of a dedicated travel and transport page on the Trust’s intranet site, which
employees can use to reserve a place on the shuttle bus, as well as to book the blue light
vehicle to transport urgent items
• Extraction of vital management information from the intranet site to allow monitoring of
shuttle bus uptake and employee travel patterns
• Transition to the OGCbuying.solutions framework agreement for the supply of fuel cards, allowing the Trust to monitor vehicle mileage and miles per gallon performance, identify poor performing vehicles, monitor budgets and measure carbon footprint.

Follow up plans
The Trust has signed up to the Energy Saving Trust ‘Motorvate’ scheme, which will regularly review progress towards its 18% reduction in carbon emissions target. A regular monitoring scheme is fundamental to the ongoing development of the travel strategy and review of progress against objectives. All monitoring information will be used to refine and develop the Trust’s overall Travel Plan and will be shared with staff to illustrate what progress has been made.