Your opinion

SIR – Your otherwise excellent feature on congestion charging (Fleet NewsNet, November 25) contains an error. You comment that rental companies must settle the fines themselves and recharge their customers.

Not so. Currently, where the rental period is less than six months’ hire, companies can transfer the liability for paying the fines directly to the driver. Where the rental period is longer than six months then, for the time being, the hire company will pay the fine and recharge the costs, often including an administration fee, to the driver or company concerned.

Under new legislation, demanded by the BVRLA and currently going through the legislative process, it won’t be long before hire companies will be able to transfer liability for paying fines irrespective of the contract length.

Our own research among our leasing members shows a whopping 475 drivers a day are failing to pay the congestion charge causing totally unnecessary fines of nearly £24,000 to their employers. Add a similar amount in administration costs and you’re talking about a cost of virtually £50,000 – per day.

Every major leasing or rental company now has to employ staff just to deal with penalty charge notices including congestion charge fines. Can this be right? Shouldn’t drivers be more careful before racking up these excessive fines? After all, it’s hardly difficult to know when you’re entering the zone in London.

To enter it, even inadvertently, and then not pay the £5 charge on the day smacks to me of carelessness at best and driver culpability at worst.

Perhaps employers, if they don’t already, should insist that their drivers pay all such fines.

ROBIN MACKONOCHIE
Head of communications
British Vehicle Rental and Leasing Association

Bosses need a push on safety issues

SIR – I read with interest David Faithful’s article concerning corporate and social responsibility (Fleet News, November 18) and I would fully agree with his suggestion that there is no point in simply drafting a health and safety policy which is not then adequately implemented.

This clearly defeats the object of formulating a policy in the first place and provides no protection for employees in terms of their safety nor for company directors in the eyes of the law.

More than a third of all road traffic accidents involve at-work drivers and it is estimated that this is currently costing UK businesses £2.7 billion per year.

Many of these accidents involve employees who are using their own private vehicles, which company directors cannot be sure are safe to drive.

Rental cars, on the other hand, are regularly checked by the rental company every time they are used. By utilising rental cars as an alternative to the employee’s private car, employers remove the risk to themselves of prosecution and provide a greater element of protection for the driver.

If the new corporate killing law does indeed make it onto the Statute Book, it will put the necessary pressure on company directors to deal with the issue of health and safety properly.

However, if the law is delayed even further, it will send out completely the wrong message to industry, potentially encouraging companies to be complacent in their attitude towards health and safety and continuing to put drivers at risk from road accidents at work.

TONY DONNELLY
Managing director
Goodwood Rental

Contract hire is dying out

SIR – In your article ‘Companies vote with their fleet’ (Fleet NewsNet, November 18), Janet Entwistle hints that contract hire is nearing the end of its useful life. More likely, it is dying a slow, lingering, painful death.

The inflexibility of the product has, in itself, contributed to fleet decision-makers using other avenues of vehicle procurement. With regard to her comments that ‘cheap man-hour rates meant cheap service’, again I have to agree, but the customer cannot always expect a flexible, risk-free package to include good service for free. Flexibility is the way forward and the flexibility always ensures the fleet manager remains in control.

We at Lothian tailor our service level agreements to meet each individual customer’s needs, which benefits both parties. Our own individual fleet size of 1,000 is some way short of BT’s, but our collective group (Northgate) fleet size is in excess of 50,000 units. This fleet size has been achieved by being flexible.

We always ask: ‘What does the customer want?’ and tailor a package to suit. There might be such thing as a free lunch, but there’s never any free delivery or collection.

MIKE MASON
Depot/operations manager
Lothian Self Drive