Feature Grey’s anatomy
Home and hybrid working has caused an explosion in grey fleet. Jack Carfrae asks how it can and should be managed with an eye on sustainability.
rey fleet is an ever-present trope in our industry. It is always there in the background, undulating between the well-managed – those who check licences, vehicle condition, that drivers have business insurance – and the frankly dreadful – fleets which, innocently or otherwise, do not do any of that.
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It is also a tricky thing to clean up in the environmental sense. The degree of control a business exerts over its new vehicle choice list is far greater than its grip on employees’ own vehicles, which inevitably equals older cars with higher CO2.
Following its October 2022 webinar, the AFP reported that grey fleet emissions were drawing attention at board level. Directors were said to have broadened their focus to Scope 3 emissions – those from assets not directly owned by the organisation, but indirectly involved in its operations – and were
allegedly questioning the worth of electrifying their core vehicles when grey fleet lagged so far behind.
Both are legitimate concerns, and they come against a backdrop of increasing levels of grey fleet. In February, rental firm Europcar conducted a survey of “500 fleet/office/ facilities/general managers and business travel managers” and, among other areas, quizzed them on employees’ use of their own vehicles for work. A total of 80.67% of respondents said their staff used personal vehicles for work, and 60.74% claimed their organisation’s grey fleet usage had increased in the previous 12 months compared to pre-Covid. Such figures should not come as a surprise considering how workplace logistics have changed. According to the Office for National Statistics, around 12% of working adults said they had worked from home at some point in the previous seven days when surveyed before
the pandemic. That peaked at 49% in the first half of 2020, dropped to 38% in May 2022, then rose to 40% in the most recent survey that was taken in February.
Home and hybrid working has clearly stuck around, and it is not at all uncommon to hear employees say, ‘I just pop in once or twice a week, now’. For those who drive to work, that absence of commutes obviously represents a CO2 saving. Couple it with Teams and Zoom calls in place of far-flung physical meetings, and things have unquestionably improved from a sustainability perspective, but these dynamics also feed grey fleet.
Forget the ecological angle for a second: commuting has never been a company’s responsibility, but a predominantly home- based employee occasionally driving their personal car to an office is. Business Car has also heard anecdotal cases of traditionally office-based staff resorting to personal
“Suddenly, we’relooking at tens of thousands of vehicles that are now technically a company vehicle.”
24 | May 2023 |
www.businesscar.co.uk
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