7 tips for creating an effective grey fleet

Do you know how large your grey fleet is?

Creating an effective grey fleet can help to reduce costs, save on admin and mitigate risk

Many work journeys every day are undertaken by employees driving their personal vehicles. While this doesn’t seem like a big deal on the surface, especially if these journeys only take 10 or 20 minutes, without a robust grey fleet management policy in place you could be exposing your business to unnecessary risk.

An effective grey fleet management strategy will keep your employees safe and protect other road users, but it will also reduce the risk of your business being held liable for any collisions or other incidents, protecting your finances and your reputation.

Creating a robust policy is something that Corparison can help your business with to ensure no stone is left unturned and you’re covered for every situation. 

But to help kickstart the process, we’ve compiled seven top tips for creating an effective grey fleet. 

1. Identify who your grey fleet drivers are

It can be easy for grey fleet drivers to fall through the cracks.

Any driver who undertakes a business trip in their personal car, even if that trip is only a mile down the road, is classified as a grey fleet driver and would fall under your grey fleet policy. 

When a member of staff undertakes a business trip, you have a duty of care to extend your fleet management policy to their vehicle and ensure that your employee is safe while out on the road on business. 

Your grey fleet vehicles are subject to the same safety policies as the rest of your company owned fleet, including insurance, tax, MOT and licence checks. 

2. Understand how your grey fleet is made up

If you don’t know the makeup of your grey fleet, you won’t be able to get accurate reporting on measures like business mileage and fuel reimbursement.

Conducting an in-depth fleet audit might be time-consuming, but it will help you to be able to create a grey fleet policy and make sure that the cars that fall under your grey fleet are safe and fit for purpose. 

This audit will also flag any potential health and safety risks to your drivers, as well as help you to understand what impact your grey fleet might have on your environmental and sustainability policies, especially if a lot of your grey fleet vehicles are older with higher emission levels and lower safety standards.

Gathering data will also help to confirm grey fleet mileage claims so neither you nor your drivers are out of pocket.

3. Business travel needs

You’ll also want to understand how and why your employees drive their cars on business trips.

It might be that it’s just more convenient to hop in their car to get to where they need to be, or it might be that the employee is unaware of other options. But whatever your employees reasoning for their journey, without a coherent strategy and mileage claims system in place, you could be losing money.

Telematics or phone apps are one way to collect data on journey patterns and mileage that can help you understand how your grey fleet is being used for the business. 

When you have this information, it’ll be much easier to implement a grey fleet policy, as well as consider alternative transport solutions that could ultimately be more cost-effective and safer. 

4. Vehicle and driver documentation

All vehicles used for work purposes need to be safe, well maintained, and driven by someone with the correct licence and insurance - even if the business does not own the vehicle. 

Within your grey fleet policy, you’ll need to be ensuring that all driving licences and insurance documents are checked for both grey fleet and regular fleet drivers. Without a diligent checking process in place, you could be liable in the event of an incident.

Regularly checking driving licences means you’ll be on the ball when it comes to ensuring all your drivers are actually fit to drive and you’ll have an accurate overview of their risk profile, while making sure that all insurance documentation and MOT checks (in a car over three years old) are in place to prevent you from potentially having to pay out thousands should your employee be involved in any collision, or other incident where you could be held liable for damages.

5. Driver training and safety inspections

Despite millions of us doing it every year, driving can be extremely dangerous. For a lot of people, driving might be the most dangerous aspect of their job.

If you provide any driver training to your fleet drivers as a way to mitigate some of the risks faced and ensure their driving is as safe as possible, it’s worth extending this training to your grey fleet drivers too.

There are other ways to help reduce the risk that grey fleet can pose too, like providing a mobile phone use policy, limiting the amount of driving hours, reminding employees of the importance of regular breaks, and developing procedures to follow should they be involved in an incident.

Regular, mandatory safety checks can also help.

As well as daily or weekly visual checks by your drivers, it could be worth organising periodic safety checks to be done by a qualified mechanic to ensure that your grey fleet, which can be significantly older and in worse condition than your regular fleet or company cars, are still fit to be driven on work journeys. 

6. Develop a robust grey fleet policy

A grey fleet policy will help to formally enforce all of your findings from your data gathering and grey fleet checks, and put in place standards that need to be adhered to for your grey fleet to be as safe as possible and pose as little risk to your business as possible.

Your grey fleet management policy can include a set of minimum standards for a grey fleet vehicle, such as age, engine size and fuel type, as well as outlining expectations around conduct, insurance and how many points they have on their licence.

You’ll want to make sure you’re getting all your grey fleet drivers to sign a copy of the policy too, to make sure they’ve received and read the policy. 

7. Consider alternatives to grey fleet

There are always going to be occasions where a grey fleet vehicle is the most convenient option for a work journey. But it’s still worth considering alternative methods of transport that could work out to be safer and more cost-effective.

These alternatives could help you to hit your sustainability goals too, by encouraging your employees to ditch their vehicles and use a pool car or a daily rental, which is likely to be newer and emit fewer emissions than their cars. 

Utilising daily rentals or having pool cars on hand, if it works for your business and the nature of the journey, can also help save you money when it comes to mileage claims and parking costs.

You could also look at implementing an electric car salary sacrifice scheme and encouraging your employees into EVs. Not only is this a greener method of transport, but it also limits the number of grey fleet cars you have on hand, ensures that your employees will be driving newer, safer vehicles, and could even save you money.