How to Make Your Fleet Carbon Neutral

Cutting carbon emissions and improving environmental credentials is back on the agenda since we now know that climate change is caused by humans. However, for many businesses, pollution from the fleet represents the most substantial element of their environmental footprint. 

Regrettably, offsetting or reducing greenhouse gas emissions is not yet a legal requirement and in times of recession it’s not surprising it therefore slips down the priority list for most businesses.  

 

Notwithstanding this, at RVM we take a more positive view.  Our experience shows that businesses would like to be able to improve and demonstrate their corporate social responsibility.  

Additionally, major elements of a typical Tender response will now require you to show how your business minimises its impact on the environment.  Thirdly, if you’re a ‘plc’, you have to include a report on your greenhouse gas emissions as part of your annual report and accounts.

Bitter pills are often easier to swallow if you put them with something sweet!  In other words, we believe the cost of offsetting the carbon footprint of your fleet should be absorbed into other associated services in which a fleet needs to invest.  In doing just that, RVM can ease the financial burden, whilst offering all the benefits.

By measuring the carbon footprint of your fleet we can calculate how many verified carbon units we need to buy on your behalf to offset your emissions. A certificate verifies our investment on your behalf into a specific forestry project in the developing world.

Quality and traceability are essential in any green business initiative and our carbon credits are certified by internationally recognised standards such as the ‘Verified Carbon Standard’ (VCS) and the ‘Climate, Community and Biodiversity’ (CCB) standard.

By integrating the offset scheme into all our accident and risk management services as standard we are giving our fleet clients peace of mind that their fleet operations are as green as possible. 

Find out how you can become a Carbon Neutral Fleet at - http://ow.ly/p18dJ

Grey Fleet Monitoring procedures - an essential guide.

Are you one of the 34% of organisations that do not have Grey Fleet Monitoring procedures in place?

Private car use for business is up

Latest figures from the HMRC puts the number of private cars used for business at up to four million - it’s an issue that employers and fleet managers cannot ignore.

34% of organisations admitted they do not have Grey Fleet procedures in place for checking: driving licences, mot certificates, insurance cover, road tax and service records (Department of Transport/HSE/ARVAL statistics).

Your legal 'Duty of Care' requirement

Employers owe the same duty of care to staff driving their own vehicles for work, as they do to employees driving company vehicles. There are a number of legal instruments in place to ensure that organisations honour duty of care.

These ‘instruments’ include the Health and Safety at Work Act, and the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act. The Office of Government Commerce's best practice guide states that “both management and employees can be prosecuted for road traffic crashes involving work-related journeys, even when the driver is using their own vehicle”.

The need for robust policy

This means that organisations need robust policies and procedures in place to ensure that the car is fit for purpose, has a valid MoT, is insured for business use and that the employee has a valid driving licence.
Employers need to be able to demonstrate the steps they have taken to manage duty of care.

Click here for our FREE essential guide to Grey Fleet Monitoring 

To find out how we can help contact us on 01132248898.

The relationship between Safety Culture, Driver Attitude and Accident Liability

There is much talk in the fleet press and from ‘risk management’ suppliers about how important it is to do licence checks and assess drivers and do some form of driver training.  

As elements of RVM’s Full Circle product, we recognise these techniques can contribute towards identifying and thereby setting a course to reduce risk but, as evidence shows, these initiatives will fail to do anything other than tick some compliance boxes unless a key ingredient is present.

That ingredient is culture change.  

The most difficult hurdle for an arms-length risk supplier is to influence each drivers attitude to driving safety and to make he or she know how the organisation views its importance and to ensure this is visibly demonstrated by the most senior members of the company. 

Tools for achieving this are most often missing from the repertoire of traditional suppliers of ‘road risk management’.

Clearly there must be an economically sensible balance between the cost of risk and the cost of preventing it and therefore any culture change tools must be flexed according to the circumstances that prevail in each fleet.  

For this reason, every Full Circle risk reduction program from RVM Fleet Services will be different for each client.

The level of culture change may even vary sometimes between departments within the same client and therefore the solution may need to be highly tailored in order to ensure money and time is most usefully employed where it is likely to have the most beneficial impact.

The scope and nature of the tools required to achieve a cultural change in attitudes toward driving safety within any organisation that runs a fleet of vehicles (main fleet or ‘grey’ fleet) are therefore critical.  

RVM Fleet Services specialises in assessing where on the risk spectrum a fleet might sit and in introducing appropriate culture change tools that are designed to have the maximum positive effect, whilst being proportionate in terms of cost.

For more information on how we can help improve the safety culture within your organisation, contact us now on 01132248888 or click here to send us an e-mail