VAUXHALL is to set aside one day a month when employees will be encouraged to leave their cars at home. It follows a one-day Congestion Challenge in May when Vauxhall's Luton-based staff were asked to work at home or use alternative means of transport to get to work or to take part in a car-sharing scheme. It was so successful that it now looks set to become a monthly exercise, starting in January.

Vauxhall chairman and managing director Nick Reilly said: 'We are planning to identify one day a month where each department will go without their cars. It will be the same day for the whole company and we will try to minimise internal meetings which will allow people to work at home and people to plan their day in advance to make use of our car-sharing database.'

Reilly said that it would not be possible to adopt such practices on an everyday basis, but a single day a month allowed staff to plan their diaries to fit around it. Last year's one-day challenge involved about 1,000 staff at two sites and was designed as a controlled experiment, the results of which could be translated into longer-term initiatives.