Nottingham City Council is ramping up its electric vehicle plans as the city looks to tackle air pollution by introducing a Clean Air Zone (CAZ).

Its fleet team is all too aware of the need to reduce vehicle emissions. 

Levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) in the city currently exceed the legal limits and it is one of five (along with Birmingham, Derby, Leeds and Southampton) to be mandated by the Government to introduce a clean air zone (CAZ) by the end of 2019.

Nottingham is still looking at options before seeking to determine which vehicle types will be subject to a levy. 

Both Ady Cawrey, commercial operations manager – fleet, and Andrew Smith, assistant manager – fleet, say the council must “lead by example” with the vehicles it operates. 

The council already has a number of Euro 6 diesel vehicles and has been operating electric vehicles (EVs) since 2010. 

It made a commitment last year to ramp up the number of ultra-low emission vehicles (ULEVs) on its road-going fleet (including cars, vans, HGVs, tractors and ride-on mowers) to 80 – or 15% – by 2020, after becoming a Go Ultra Low company.

The scheme, which is part of the wider Go Ultra Low campaign (jointly backed by the automotive industry and Government), is open to organisations that have at least one plug-in vehicle on their fleet and commit to at least 5% of their fleet being ULEVs by 2020.

Nottingham is also a Go Ultra Low city. Together with Nottinghamshire County Council and Derby City Council it secured £6.1 million Government funding last year to install 230 charge points and will offer ULEV owners discount parking, as well as access to 13 miles of bus lanes along key routes across the cities.

The access is for all ULEVs – vehicles producing less than 75g/km of CO2 – not just EVs. 

The Government funding is also being used to pay for a new business support programme, letting local companies ‘try before they buy’.

The council has 25 EVs, having recently taken delivery of three Nissan Leafs (taking the total to five) and two Nissan e-NV200s (taking the total to 18).

It also has two Mitsubishi i-Mievs, both of which it has operated since 2010, as part of its pool car scheme. 

“They have done around 30,000 miles at a cost of about £4,100 each. That’s close to eight years so at £512.50 each year they have been brill,” Smith says. 

However, the council’s early experience of electric vans wasn’t so successful.

“We had a couple of Smith Electric Ford Transit panel vans which worked OK for a couple of years then they just got so unreliable, so expensive to maintain, that eventually we couldn’t warrant having them so we disposed of them at auction,” Smith says.  

But that hasn’t deterred the council from operating electric vans and in December 2015, it decided to replace eight diesel vans with e-NV200s, following a successful month-long trial with the managers of its neighbourhood operation. 

The managers visit workers at various sites around the city and typically do around 20 miles per day before returning to base, making them “ideal candidates” to drive an electric van, according to Smith. 

The e-NV200s cost more upfront than the diesel vans the council previously operated but Smith estimates they are 80% cheaper to run when comparing vans of a similar size, even taking into account the cost of electricity. 

The council’s highways and energy infrastructure team also now operates five e-NV200s and the transport strategy team has invested in one, which it is able to use at events and as a demonstrator for local businesses who want to trial an electric vehicle. 

Two other departments – community protection and trading standards – also have EVs. Community protection has two Leafs and an e-NV200 while trading standards has one of each.

Smith, who works with the council’s procurement team to acquire vehicles, has identified which conventional diesel and petrol vehicles could be replaced by ULEVs over the next three years.

It is not financially viable for the council to replace all of the vehicles “in one year”.

His plan, which he dubs his “wish list”, is to replace another 13 vehicles before the end of the financial year, 16 vehicles in 2018/19 and 27 vehicles in 2019/20 but he needs to work with the different operational areas to ensure the vehicles are fit for purpose. 

The community protection team, for example, has two Škoda Octavia Scout 4x4s to carry the equipment they need for their role.

A Leaf wouldn’t be suitable so Smith is considering a petrol hybrid SUV. 

The council’s Leafs are all pool cars, which are used by staff to get to meetings around the city. Smith would like to convert the entire pool car fleet of 14 cars to electric but some staff, such as the council’s social workers, have to travel long distances.

Staff are permitted to use their own vehicles for business journeys but must first consider whether the journey is necessary and to look at alternatives such as the bus, tram, train, walking or cycling before opting for their own car or a pool car.

Utilisation of the pool car fleet is currently 70%. 

The council also boosts utilisation of its entire fleet by renting vehicles to staff at the weekend. 

The current Leafs are all 30kWh and are achieving a real-world range of 80-100 miles, while the e-NV200s typically manage 60-70 miles. 

The council has 27 charging points at various depots and offices and will benefit from Nottingham’s plans to develop a public EV charging network as part of its Go Ultra Low city status.

While council employees are given a 30-minute induction prior to driving an EV, Smith believes more education is needed to make sure “everybody is switched on to smart recharging” so vehicles aren’t simply put on charge when they return to the depot in the afternoon, they are set to charge overnight when the electricity is cheapest. 

However, the challenge is making sure that if there is an emergency call-out in the evening, the vehicles have sufficient charge. 

Drive feedback about the EVs has been “very positive”, with the only issue being that the range drops during the winter months when drivers use the heater. 

Cawrey says: “There are some culture changes with electric vehicles but those barriers are being broken down quite easily for us.”

He adds that reliability of the products (aside from the Smith Electric conversions) has been “really good”. 

As the council’s electric fleet expands, it is hoping to maintain the vehicles in its own workshops. 

It has started to train its workshop technicians on basic ULEV maintenance and the fleet team is discussing the possibility of accredited training through Nissan.

“It’s an investment in our technicians to show them that we want to give them something, we want to develop their skills,” Smith says.

“If you want to work with the city council there is an opportunity where we are going to give you access to future technologies.”

Nottingham City Council favours an in-house approach to fleet management. Consequently it employs 52 staff in in its fleet team, including administrative support, technicians and supervisory staff. 

Cawrey is the council’s operator licence holder and oversees the whole operation, including responsibility for increasing commercialisation of the council’s workshops. 

The workshops maintain around 300 vans for Nottingham City Homes (a standalone company, which maintains the council’s housing stock), some 200 vehicles for Nottinghamshire Fire and Rescue, 50 vehicles for Rushcliffe Borough Council and 74 vehicles for Arriva Passenger Services vehicles for the Nottingham area, as well as maintaining the council’s own core fleet of 337 cars, vans and HGVs, plus around 800 items of plant and equipment.

“Nottingham is a forward-thinking council when it comes to commercialisation,” Smith says. “We’ve got people with skills, we’ve got facilities, so why not offer them to the commercial world?”

The Nottinghamshire Fire and Rescue contract includes mobile servicing, major servicing and defect reporting. 

“We respond to category one defects within two hours across the whole of the county,” Cawrey says.

“Nottinghamshire is quite a long county with the northern-most fire stations doing more work in South Yorkshire than they actually do in Nottinghamshire so it’s quite a spread out service.”

Cawrey points out that the council, as a fleet operator itself, understands the importance of minimising downtime and is looking at offering a collection and delivery service.

“If you book your vehicles in with a local dealer you join the queue,” he says. “We’re trying to improve the service.”

Cawrey is also undertaking a detailed review of the council’s own fleet, looking at how processes and systems can be improved.

“In the past nine months we’ve been going through a full review, a fleet service improvement plan where we look at every element of what we do,” Cawrey says. 

“We’re down to looking at how we can update our fleet management system, how we can improve our internal pool hire, the way we invoice customers, the way we recruit, the way we retain staff. 

“That process is ongoing, we’re about 50% through.

We’re trying to raise the profile of fleet services because we are an integral part of the council in keeping the cogs turning; it is an important part of the business.”

The review has led the fleet team to launch a ‘driver improvement scheme’, which aims to tackle avoidable accidents. 

“We’re trying to get more ownership from the driver, more responsibility, so they treat it like a £30,000 asset,” says Smith. 

“We’ve just introduced a better, more fit for purpose pre-use inspection pad and we do audits so we’ll be out at 6am quizzing drivers and looking at the vehicles.”

The workshops have also been instructed not to repair damaged vehicles where no accident report form has been completed.

The fleet team hold monthly review meetings with the operational areas to discuss driver conduct, the results of the audit and what the avoidable damage is. 

Cawrey says: “We give out good news as well as bad so it works both ways and it’s developing all the time but the aim is to ensure we’ve got a compliant fleet, to ensure that everything is safe, that accidents are kept to a minimum and the benefit of that is reduction in cost.

"We think we’re starting to see that.”

The council is also investing in re-training drivers where appropriate and in technology. All of the vans now have front- and rear-facing cameras. 

“We’ve sold it to the drivers ‘it’s not there to catch you out, it’s to protect you. If somebody says you caught their vehicle parked we can check your camera system and see you’ve not done it’ because we get false claims all the time,” says Smith. 

Vehicle tracking has been fitted to the majority of the council’s vehicles, including pool cars, for the past six or seven years.

The data enabled the council to remove three sweepers from the fleet, making significant savings. 

The council uses Civica’s Tranman fleet management software in its workshops but its IT department is developing a system which will pull in data from various sources to give the team a holistic view of the fleet. 

Next on the fleet team agenda is to look at investment in the workshops and investigate ways to lower emissions on its heavier commercial vehicles. 

A lack of manufacturer product means that the council is looking at an aftermarket conversion from Magtec. 

“We’re keen to integrate modern technology, cleaner vehicles, more fuel-efficient vehicles on our fleet,” says Smith. “We don’t want to stand still.”

 

Consortium buys to the power of 15

Nottingham City Council is making significant procurement savings by being a member of the Notts and Derbys Transport Consortium.

The consortium combines the buying power and fleet experience of 15 Nottinghamshire- and Derbyshire-based local authorities to buy vehicles and tyres. 

The consortium meets quarterly to discuss maintenance issues and opportunities to save money. 

Andrew Smith says the council’s approach is to get suppliers to “sharpen their pencils”. 

“Nottingham City Council challenges everything,” he says. “‘You want us to pay how much? We’re not paying that. You can do better than that’.” 

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