Arval says larger companies lead the way in offering employee car leasing

Larger companies are more likely to offer employee car leasing than smaller employers, according to research from Arval.

The company’s Mobility Observatory 2019 found that 29% of businesses with more than 1,000 employees offer some form of leasing, compared to 16% by those with 100-999 employees, 6% of 10-99 employees and 2% with fewer than 10 employees.

Overall, a cash allowance for a car is the most popular form of provision at 7%, followed by salary sacrifice (6%), personal contract hire (6%), affinity schemes (2%) and personal contract purchase (1%).

Shaun Sadlier, head of Arval Mobility Observatory in the UK, said: “This is an area where we, as a business, have seen substantial growth in recent years, especially when it comes to personal contract hire, affinity and salary sacrifice schemes.

“Increasingly, businesses are seeing it as an attractive employee benefit to offer car leasing schemes that offer many of the advantages of company car schemes to a wider range of the people working for them.

“This is happening first in larger corporates, as you would expect, where many major employers are introducing affinity schemes that provide a fully funded, maintained and insured car for a single monthly payment. It’s an interesting development.”
 
Sadlier said that the trend was probably more than offsetting slight reductions in the number of company cars being offered by employers.

He added: “We have been saying for some time that while there has been a marginal fall in the number of company cars generally, the overall fleet leased to employees in the UK has increased.

“As our figures show, even among large employers, penetration for this type of initiative is still only around the 30% mark, so we expect this to be a major area of growth for leasing companies in the next few years.”

The 2019 edition of Arval Mobility Observatory covers 3,930 fleets and asks a set of questions about fleet and mobility trends.