A new grey fleet service that mitigates risks and slashes business costs is now available from Mercia Fleet Management – with a free offer to the first 10 companies that sign up to it.

Mercia is offering its new grey fleet management service free of charge to the first 10 businesses that apply for it

Mercia launched last month as the new specialist fleet management division of EV sal sac specialist Fleet Evolution, offering a comprehensive portfolio of fleet management services, backed with a focus on high levels of customer service.

It’s now introduced a new grey fleet service, aimed at businesses where significant numbers of employees use their own vehicles on company business and then reclaim business mileage at up to 45p per mile, under the Approved Mileage Allowance Payments (AMAPs) scheme.

The approach is two-fold; Mercia first assesses the need for vehicle use and then evaluates the cost efficiency to the business of using AMAPs,.

“Our key objectives with Mercia Grey Fleet Management are to mitigate risk, as well as assessing cost effectiveness to the business,” said Andrew Leech, managing director at Fleet Evolution and head of the new fleet management division.

“Allowing employees to use their own vehicles exposes the business to considerable duty of care risks as, generally, employees’ own vehicles are in worse condition than new. Typically they are eight years old, and are often without adequate servicing or relevant business-use insurance.

“Our starting point is always to assess whether a journey is required at all, as one thing the pandemic has shown us is that online conference calls can be as effective as face-to-face meetings.”

Mobility decisions are made using a decision tree based on the number of business miles that are required to be travelled.

For journeys under 5 miles, a typical recommendation might be to take a taxi or cycle where appropriate. At 15-25 miles, the advice would generally be to use employee-owned vehicles with checks carried out on vehicle condition and relevant business insurance before allowing use.

From 25-100 miles the suggestion might be to take the train or consider a taxi, comparing the costs of these alternative means of transport to those likely to be incurred under AMAPs.

And at over 100 miles, the recommendation would be to use a hire car as being the most cost-effective option. All bookings are handled by Mercia Fleet Management administrators and work out cheaper than grey fleet use while also removing the duty of care risk.

Mercia Fleet Management is offering the newly launched service free of charge to the first 10 businesses that apply for it.

“We will be offering this for a limited time only as we are very confident in the capabilities of the new service,” added Andrew Leech.