“By streamlining the way that employees travel between meetings, an organisation is also providing itself with a great competitive advantage.

“In short, it’s the equivalent of implementing best practice.”

How to implement a travel plan

The consensus among those who have put travel plans in place is that buy-in from senior management is essential if they’re going to be accepted by employees.

What’s more, frank and open discussions are also required at the outset to ensure that any changes are acceptable to staff.

David Watts says: “The EST works with organisations to cut their carbon emissions. But one of the biggest issues we have when it comes to calculating these emissions is getting an accurate picture of what the fleet is doing in the first place.”

Before any travel plan is introduced, fleets need to collate how many business miles are being undertaken during a typical year – from this point they can assess how they can do things better.

One example is grey fleet, where employees use their own car for business purposes. If organisations pay staff the AMAP rate for grey fleet use then, depending on the length of the journey, it could be cheaper to put those employees in a rental car which is likely to have lower emissions.

The typical cut-off point is 70-100 miles a day depending on your daily hire rates.

“There’s also the recognition that travelling represents time out of an organisation’s budget and it might be more cost-effective for an employee to undertake a journey on a train giving them the opportunity to work,” says Watts.

“And once an organisation has devised a travel plan that covers its individual issues, it’s important that it manages it properly to ensure that it’s not ignored or forgotten about. This tends to be the major pitfall that occurs.

“It’s best to appoint a specific individual to take responsibility for the process – and that could be the fleet manager or someone else.”

The Environment Agency (EA) has committed itself to reducing its business mileage by 25% by 2015 compared with 2005/06.
One of the main ways it is achieving this is by asking staff to adhere to its own personal hierarchy of travel decision making.

Simon Dawes, head of internal environmental management, says staff bought into the hierarchy from its launch in 2006.

He explains: “To start with, we made it really clear to our staff what we want to achieve in terms of reducing the amount of business miles they travel.

"And we’ve tried to make it as easy as possible for them to make low carbon choices by using our own hierarchy of travel decision making.

“We’ve calculated that we’re now avoiding one million miles a month through phone and web conferencing alone.