Most company car drivers who opt for a greener car will receive a top-up payment of £40 per month by choosing a greener option. In some instances, it can be as much as £150.

So far, 25% of drivers have opted for lower-emission vehicles – far in excess of the expected 10%.

Parton says reducing mileage is also a priority, and since 2009 the company has cut the total number of business miles by 5% year-on-year.

“Most of our cars don’t do huge mileages over their four-year cycle,” he says. “We have handed cars back with 60,000 miles on them, so we’re not a high-mileage fleet.

"We have looked at how we do business and we know that face-time is very important, but we have also had the opportunity to change some things, such as when a new commercial director started.

“We restructured the way the advertising team worked and made changes such as stopping staff based in Great Yarmouth servicing accounts in King’s Lynn.

"It takes nearly two hours to drive from one to the other, so by working more locally employees could see far more people.”

Next-generation fuels may continue to frustrate Parton, but he can have no such disappointment about the impact his other policies have had: Archant is doing all it can to minimise its impact on the planet.

Greg Parton on electric bikes

“Several of our senior managers and, in particular, our operations director Nick Schiller, cycle to work.

“There was almost a jokey comment about how we shouldn’t have electric cars, we should have electric bikes.

“It was an interesting idea and as we thought about it we realised there were some plusses to that. We have offices where getting around on a bike is at least as easy as other means, so we bought two of them.

“We had quite a lot of interest from staff and we have actually seen the number of people cycling to work go up.

“The truth of the matter is that there hasn’t been much business use of the electric bikes, but the shining exception is at our Kensington office where the bike there is used quite a lot instead of a pool car because parking in that area is a real issue.

“There are also a lot of very short journeys and people can still arrive fresh to their meetings because they haven’t had to pedal them.

“Eighteen months on, we haven’t bought any more but we are using the two we have got and I do know there are a few employees who have bought their own electric bikes as a result of using ours.”