Leasing companies LeasePlan and Arval have joined motor manufacturers Ford and Volvo as the first users of the free-to-use ReCare safety recall scheme.

The ReCare programme, which goes lives this month, has been established by Oxford-based online solutions provider Ebbon-Dacs for the BVRLA with the intention of providing a single location for all manufacturers to list their safety recall notifications.

Fleet operators including contract hire and leasing, daily rental and fleet management companies which are BVRLA members, or their appointed agents, can retrieve the information by inputting their own fleet data for comparison purposes. 

Steve Molyneux (pictured), commercial director at Ebbon-Dacs who is managing the ReCare project, said: “Ebbon-Dacs has trusted and long term business and technical relationships with both Arval and LeasePlan and it has been great to work with them on this program.

“The size of their fleets, with tens of thousands of vehicles, makes them ideal early adopters for ReCare.

“It has been a similar pleasure working with Ford and Volvo in establishing the programme. Their desire to see ReCare developed for the good of the industry has provided a significant support for us.”

“Ford and Volvo are currently completing their own technical processes to enable them to feed recall data into ReCare and will be in a position to do so from early November.

“On that basis, we will then conduct a final process and volume review with live data from both manufacturers reconciled against live fleet data supplied by LeasePlan and Arval.  ReCare will then be open for BVRLA members to use shortly thereafter,” he continued.

Earlier this month, vehicle provenance check providers CDL Vehicle Information Services, Experian and HPI confirmed that they would be carrying out free of charge vehicle checks to ensure that VIN-based recall data from manufacturers matched registration number information provided by fleet operators.

The ReCare scheme was announced 12 months ago after the BVRLA appointed Ebbon-Dacs as technology partner to deliver a standardised, free-to-use recall system for its members, who own and operate more than 2.5m vehicles.

"ReCare has the potential to deliver huge duty of care and road safety benefits to the fleet management sector," said BVRLA chief executive John Lewis.

"It also has the potential to significantly reduce the administrative burden faced by manufacturers trying to notify recalls to thousands of different fleet owners."

Ebbon-Dacs has been working for the last year to develop a web-based vehicle recall system that shows all vehicles subject to a safety recall or any issue that a manufacturer wishes to make a proactive notification about, and highlights those fleet vehicles to their fleet operator.

Last month saw some of the final testing of the system and this month will see the final reviews being carried out, including final validation of reports with fleet operators and manufacturers, before the system is officially ready to go live, in line with the pre-agreed schedule.