Northgate recruiting technicians to maintain growing fleet

A recruitment campaign to find a further 50 technicians has been launched by Northgate Vehicle Hire.

The company is reinforcing its service and maintenance capabilities across its nationwide network of 54 workshops and fleet of 50,000 light commercial vehicles (LCVs).

With a growing fleet of electric LCVs, it is also providing training to its increasing ranks of technicians so they can service and maintain electric vehicles (EVs) in addition to internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles.

This coincides with Northgate receiving its IMI Electric Vehicle Accreditation, which enables it to manage its own EV training internally.

One-in-eight of Northgate’s new vacancies are for mobile vehicle technicians which are branch-based, and deployed where they are needed on customer sites, thus avoiding the need to visit a workshop.

With EVs having fewer moving parts, the future trend could be to carry out more basic servicing remotely, providing operators with speed and convenience, says Northgate.

Tim Bailey, Northgate’s fleet director, explained: “Our workshops remain very busy as the general age of the vehicles we provide support for increases following the reduced supply of new vehicles coming into the market.

“As a result, we are recruiting more technicians as well as getting more of them ‘EV ready’ as our fleet gradually transitions from internal combustion engines to electric,” explained

“We employ an extensive and loyal technician team with plenty of scope for promotion within branch and across the wider Redde Northgate network.”

Northgate’s strategy of running its own workshops has continued with the acquisition of traffic management specialists Blakedale in 2022, and FridgeXpress, the chilled and freezer van rental business in 2023, which both operate their own customer support and maintenance facilities.