An economic and environmental saving can be made with the effective organisation of transportation. For example to operate our fleet of almost 2,300 company cars, we paid approximately £2 million in fuel costs during 2001. The utilisation of this fuel to operate the cars generated approximately 11,000 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide (CO₂), a harmful greenhouse gas.

Therefore, we have set a target to reduce this during 2002. The average business mileage for our car fleet across the group is currently 15,899 miles per car. Our challenge is to reduce this average annual business mileage by 20 % by the end of 2002 to 12,720 avarage unit business miles.

"We are all stakeholders in this initiative both from the point of business efficiencies, health and safety and our responsibility toward the environment. We need to challenge our historic travel habits, it will have a dramatic saving on both the emissions and cost profile of the Group."

Carl Lindley, Fleet Management

The savings can be dramatic as detailed below:

Every combusted litre of:
	petrol creates 2.32 kg of CO2
	diesel creates 2.68 kg of CO2
	LPG creates 1.54 kg CO2
	Each average 1,000 business miles across the car fleet (i.e. for the ~2300 cars) generates approximately £412,000 in related costs

The motivators to reduce miles travelled are twofold:

	Reduce the need to travel
	Travel at optimum efficiency

Where there is a need for essential travel, we developed a 10-point plan to help staff reduce the impacts of travel.

Our performance

	We reduced our fleet from 2,613 company cars to 2,300 in 2001, partly due to restructuring of the Group.
	We reduced the amount of CO2 generated by company cars from 14,253 to 10,756 tonnes. Click here to view the individual Business Groups’ contribution.
	We reduced the average business miles per company car to 15,899.
	We implemented our green transport plan

Investigating Cleaner Cars

In order to reduce the emissions from company cars, we offer a wide choice of diesel vehicles together with some LPG cars and an option to trade down or opt out of company cars. In 2001, 7.5% of company car owners traded down and 6.5% traded out, therefore, helping to reduce the emissions from our fleet.

Due to the late completion of our agreement with an LPG car manufacturer only 1 LPG car was chosen from the company car list in 2001, although 5 have already been chosen in 2002.