Have fleets taken action to extend replacement cycles?

Georgina Smith, fleet administrator, Healthcare at Home: All our vehicles were three years with varying mileages, but over the past couple of years we’ve changed to pooled mileage, which has enabled us to move cars to four years and reduce them from 125,000 miles over three years to 100,000 miles over four years.

With our vans, that has also meant we’re not moving them to different geographical locations just to keep the mileages at a reasonable level.

Ian Jutson: We’ve largely kept our cars’ replacement cycles at four years.

We did a review a few years ago and decided to stick where we were, but we have reduced the mileage quite considerably.

Overall, we’ve saved in the region of 20 million miles over the past five years.

That’s been done through employing a travel hierarchy where, for example, employees have to consider public transport and tele-conferencing.

Clive Buhagiar, head of public sector, Alphabet: I think the real change in the past few years has been the shift from fleet specific policies to travel policies, because there is only so much you can do with cars and vans.

Who has a co-ordinated travel policy, where one department or manager oversees all travel requirements or where staff must consider alternatives to the company car?

Georgina Smith: I’ve been involved with booking flights for people, but it’s just a job I’ve taken on rather than it being given to me. It’s by accident rather than by design.

Derek Thornton: There are a lot of well-written travel policies out there, but the big problem is they don’t get enabled or policed.

And, because these costs are then spread out across the business, who ends up owning it? It just ends up sitting somewhere between HR and finance, with no co-ordination.

Ian Jutson: I think we’re slightly different because our travel policy is tied in with our CO2 targets, which are monitored rigidly and reported back up to director level.

It means there is complete buy-in from the business to reduce mileage and to adhere to the travel policy.