Standard practice in the contract hire and leasing market is for leasing suppliers to negotiate blanket benchmark mileages across the entire fleet of vehicles, with three years/60,000 miles or four year/80,000 miles being typical benchmarks

However, Glasgow-based company Fleet Alliance, says it does not accept a blanket mileage benchmarking for its clients vehicles, and is guaranteeing that it won't levy excess mileage charges if the fleet operator follows its advice in several crucial areas.

When a driver's vehicle is approaching its contracted miles, Fleet Alliance suggests a number of options to avoid incurring excess mileage charges. These include swapping high-mileage drivers who are about to exceed their mileage quota into different cars being driven by colleagues.

If this is contrary to fleet policy, then Fleet Alliance suggests recalculating and renegotiating the contract before the mileage limit is reached.

The firm says that this inevitably works out cheaper in the long run and is far more cost effective than incurring excess mileage charges.

Fleet Alliance's managing director, Martin Brown, said: 'Our guarantee is contingent on the fleet operator following our advice but other than that we are prepared to back our position that our clients will not face any excess mileage charges at the end of their vehicle contracts.

'Knowing this means our clients can budget or forecast more accurately without the threat of excessive and expensive end of contract charges.

'This new initiative removes the need for cumbersome pooled mileage schemes, as mileages are calculated in real time, and is a far more effective way of tracking and monitoring mileages.

'Many of our larger competitors rely on benchmarking of vehicle mileages as they are not prepared to go the extra mile and offer individual negotiations, but we do not believe this is in our clients' best interests and is typically more expensive,' he said.