As industry leaders call for employers to help their workers meet the burden of the increased cost of living, leasing firm Fleet Evolution is urging fleets, including SMEs, to maximise their employees' income when it comes to one of the highest areas of expense: motoring.

Fleet Evolution is a specialist in salary sacrifice schemes, in particular for cars, and says such schemes, which are cost neutral for the company to provide, are typically saving employees around a third on motoring costs - vital savings in the current economic climate.

The company's work to promote the cost-saving benefits of salary sacrifice comes as Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Trust highlight an employer's obligation to ‘do all they can' to help employees through these difficult periods. Speaking at a recent event, the Trust advocated schemes ranging from employee assistance programmes to no-cost salary initiatives.

Fleet Evolution noticed a growing trend to help maximise employee income in the early stages of the downturn when they entered the car salary sacrifice market. Now they only provide salary sacrifice and work with customers employing as little as 19 or as many as 2,400 employees.

Director Andrew Leech said: "It's not just employees feeling the financial pinch at the moment, it's the employer too and often the employer wants to do all they can to maximise their employees income but struggle to find way to achieve this. Salary sacrifice has been used to fund everything from pensions to mountain bikes but the car is seldom considered, perhaps because of the lack of providers or because of the perceived complexity of such schemes.

"In practice salary sacrifice cars we would suggest should be the first area an employer looks at, whereas other arrangements such as childcare and bikes have limited benefit with only a few employees gaining any advantage the majority of employees usually use cars, of course the added benefit is newer cars are more reliable, less polluting and generally improve productivity within the workforce."