A NEW structured personal leasing scheme is targeting companies with fleets of less than 50 vehicles with claims that it can save companies thousands of pounds a year.

Car Owner Plan is the brainchild of Giles Morris and Alan Jones, both former executive directors of Whitechapel Corporate Services, which ran one of the original personal leasing schemes implemented by firms including BP, Reuters and Siemens.

Car Owner Plan is a division of Westwood Consultancy, an Isle of Man-based specialist consultancy firm formed by two of the three original founder executive directors of a specialist taxation/business consultancy 'boutique' owned by Sedgwick Group and subsequently sold to Abbey National, parent firm of leasing giant FNVH.

Structured personal leasing schemes cut out the taxman by transferring ownership of a company car to the driver, so no benefit-in-kind tax is due on the vehicle.

By streamlining funding for the vehicle and payments for fuel, both the company and the driver can save money.

However, the cost of implementing such schemes has deterred companies from providing the service to fleets with fewer than 100 vehicles.

Jones claims much of the cost is wasted on consultancy fees and if these are stripped out, savings that used to be restricted to large companies become available to all fleets.

He said: 'Car Owner Plan is not affiliated to any manufacturer or leasing company and is in the best position to give impartial advice to small fleets and/or to employees who have been given a cash alternative and then left to their own devices.

'It attempts to strip away the jargon and explain how it achieves the savings that some FTSE 100 companies have been achieving for a number of years.'