VT Education & Skills Green Company Cars
Secure National Award

VT Training is a business division of VT Education and Skills and VT Group, it delivered vocational training to approximately 18,000 learners. The delivery involved approx 500 Vocational Coaches (VC’s) and various other employees travelling to employers premises across the UK. These employees claimed approx. 6.7 million miles at a cost of more than £2million.

The issues faced were three fold:

• Firstly the VT green agenda identified this as an area which needed to be addressed. The staff used their own cars with most of the vehicles being more than 3 years old with emissions of 200 g/km on average. This equates to 837 Tonnes of CO2 per annum.
• The second reason was employee safety. Our ability to ensure our employees are working in a safe environment with all the cars being safe and suitable for such mileage was a challenge
• Lastly staff turnover is normally high in this area which created an issue where a high proportion of the staff took a long time to achieve a reasonable level of output with them very soon after moving on. We therefore needed to find ways to try and keep them in post for as long as possible with more attractive employment packages.

Working closely with the Human Resources Director we identified a number of initiatives to support our objectives, one of them being to consider a company car scheme for staff who do not normally qualify. The initial process was slow in that we needed to find a green vehicle which achieved a balance of safety, comfort, adequate size and overall cost with the right image.

After careful consideration including staff consultation we chose the Vauxhall Corsa 1.3 CDTi Club, because it is fuel efficient and environmentally friendly (official combined mileage figure is 62.8miles per gallon, CO2 emissions are 119g/km) and the size, specification and image were approved by both staff and the company.

With an initial pilot scheme of 50 cars in February 2008 it proved to be successful and there are now more than 100 cars in service with a target of 200 to 400 cars. Employees were impressed with the choice of car and the scheme has contributed to improving staff morale and retention rates. No other learning provider offers such a benefit, furthering VT Training’s aspiration to be an employer of choice.