One of the biggest and busiest acute NHS Trusts in England has retained the Leasedrive Group to deliver its green car salary sacrifice scheme, which only allows employees to choose vehicles emitting CO2 of 140g/km or less.

Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH) chose Leasedrive to offer its ‘mycar’ scheme to its 13,000 employees in 2009 and the Trust was happy to retain the group when the three-year contract recently came to an end.

Alison Needham, pay services manager for NUH, said: “We originally implemented the car salary sacrifice scheme to deliver cost savings to the Trust, as well as offering an attractive benefit to employees.

“The people who have received their vehicles think the scheme is great and we find the helpdesk particularly good and responsive. We’ve worked hard with Leasedrive to get the right scheme for our drivers and saw no need to move to another supplier.

“We operate a green car scheme where, as well as encouraging employees to choose cars that have a lower impact on the environment, we also operate a medilink bus service which allows employees to park offsite and travel to both Nottingham City Hospital and Queen’s Medical Centre by bus.”

Roddy Graham, commercial director, Leasedrive, added: “The salary sacrifice scheme already incentivises people to choose more environmentally-friendly vehicles because drivers have to pay Benefit in Kind tax, so the lower the CO2, the less they pay.

“Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust has chosen to take this further and is using mycar to help meet its own environmental targets by putting a maximum cap on CO2 of 140g/km. This demonstrates the flexibility of the mycar scheme and how it can be tailored to meet the specific needs of different organisations.”

Under the mycar initiative, employees sacrifice some of their salary in exchange for a brand new vehicle which is fully serviced and maintained. The employee saves tax and national insurance on the money sacrificed, making it a very cost effective way of leasing a car. The Trust itself can save as much as £800 per vehicle per annum through reductions in national insurance and pension contributions.
 

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