According to Fleet Evolution, car salary schemes are typically saving employees around a third on motoring costs – vital savings in the current economic climate – and have been growing in popularity since the early stages of the downturn.

The company’s work to promote the cost-saving benefits of salary sacrifice follows a recent call by Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Trust for employers to ‘do all they can' to help employees through these difficult periods. Speaking at a recent event, the Trust advocated schemes ranging from employee assistance programmes to no-cost salary initiatives.


Director Andrew Leech said: ‘It's not just employees feeling the financial pinch at the moment, it's the employer too and often the employer wants to do all they can to maximise their employees income but struggle to find way to achieve this.

‘Salary sacrifice has been used to fund everything from pensions to mountain bikes but the car is seldom considered, perhaps because of the lack of providers or because of the perceived complexity of such schemes.



‘In practice salary sacrifice cars we would suggest should be the first area an employer looks at. Whereas other arrangements such as childcare and bikes have limited benefit, with only a few employees gaining any advantage, the majority of employees usually use cars.’

Leech also highlighted additional benefits of car salary sacrifice schemes, including the increased reliability and reduced CO2 emissions of employees running newer cars, as well as general improvements in productivity within the workforce.