Travel

Green travel policy

Employee travel – both company and privately-owned cars and fleet emissions – is a critical area for us. We have around 2,600 employees working on scattered work and building sites and we provide maintenance for more than 150,000 homes across the country.

Business driving

For cars, our approach has been first to encourage our people to choose more energy efficient vehicles through offering people a £500 low carbon car bonus, which saw us taking advantage of government incentives.

We then tried to move people towards reducing their mileage by imposing a 25,000 mile per annum business and commute driving limit for our employees with a financial penalty attached. Any penalty is to be paid by individual business units. As a result, we raised more than a million pounds to fund company carbon reduction activities. We also allow individuals to claim for business travel carried out by bicycle and encourage take up with our bike4work scheme.

The results have been dramatic: we have reduced the average emissions of cars from 160g/CO2/km in 2007 down to 128g in 2010. Our health and safety division alone reduced its mileage by nearly 25,000 miles.

Van fleet

We have also reduced the emissions of our fleet of vans from 2,556 tonnes in 2009 to 1,981 tonnes in 2010. This was through a combination of initiatives such as reducing the size of the vans we used and telematics technology. This lets us send the most efficiently-sized vehicle, best qualified tradesperson, with the right equipment to every job, minimising fuel use and maximising efficient time use. Our overall approach to transport was recognised in 2010 when we won the Energy Saving Trust / CBI Fleet Heroes private sector award.

Safer driving

Our SafeDriver programme was introduced last year to improve the safety and wellbeing of people driving for us and other drivers they shared the road with. As a result of the campaign, accidents within our van and car fleets were reduced by 20% and 2% respectively.

As part of the campaign we have validated every driver’s licence, insurance and MOT and provided handouts to reinforce messages and 'just in case' accident kits.