– By Caroline Falls –
Fleet Auto News has conducted the first-ever survey on grey fleets in Australia. It shows Australian companies are overwhelmingly concerned about the risks posed by their grey fleets.
Some 67% of respondents answered “Yes” to the question: “Are you concerned about the potential risks to your business of a grey fleet?”
The term grey fleet is relatively new to the Australian fleet management lexicon. The term defines vehicles being used by a business that it doesn’t own; vehicles owned and used by employees to conduct business and vehicles that are hired occasionally and used for business purposes.
“Having been at the forefront of the development of the grey fleet management market in Australia since 2014, the survey results certainly demonstrate how far organisations have come in recognising the issue of managing their grey fleet-related risks,” said Mathew Prestney, director of grey fleet specialist consulting group TR Fleet.
“The results also show, however, how much further organisations need to go in achieving and maintaining an acceptable level of risk management and mitigation in this space.”
Most of the respondents said that their organisations didn’t check the driver’s licence of the employee using private vehicles for business purposes. Nor did they check the road worthiness of the private vehicles being used for business purposes.
The crux of the issue is that any vehicle used for the purpose of business may be considered a workplace under various Commonwealth and state workplace health and safety laws, including the Work Health & Safety Act 2012 (Commonwealth). The business tasks can be as simple as an office worker dropping off mail to the post office on the way home from work.
The risks can be great. Far and away the biggest killer of workers in Australia are vehicle related accidents. Work Safe Australia’s 2014 report “Work-Related Traumatic Injury Fatalities” shows that across 12 years of the series, two-thirds of worker fatalities involved vehicles.
TR Fleet sponsored the survey, which was conducted online by Fleet Auto News. The respondents comprised corporate (57%), government (26%) and not-for-profit organisations (17%). Almost half of the respondents said their organisations had more than 500 employees. About one quarter had less than 100.
Most said their organisation didn’t have a grey fleet policy and most didn’t know the size of their grey fleet.
“The benefits of this survey data are numerous,” said Prestney, adding, “One fundamental positive is that we now have a solid local baseline from which we can measure the ongoing performance of organisations in this new fleet segment.”
The Fleet Auto News survey discovered that among the respondents, only 22% percent said they checked whether employee-owned vehicles that may be used for work purposes were roadworthy. Less than half of the respondents (46%) said they checked whether employees driving private vehicles for business trips held a current driver’s license.
On the question of tracking costs of private vehicles used for business trips, only 28% said they did. That means a staggering 72% said their organisations don’t know the costs of running grey fleet vehicles.
“It highlights some fundamental issues. It shows people are worried and that they know they need to start looking at their grey fleet,” said Prestney.
Some other key takeaways from the survey are:
- Not-for-profits are the most concerned about grey fleets and also display the greatest disparity in terms of best practice when it comes to grey fleet compliance. They outperformed the market in terms of driver licence and roadworthy checking, and yet vastly under performed when it came to measuring grey fleet kilometres and enforcing vehicle age and safety-standard restrictions.
- Government respondents, particularly those with more than 500 staff, displayed the highest rate of compliance with grey fleet best practice with scores between 17% and 33%. This still leaves up to 80% of respondents performing outside of best practice.
- The data from corporates with one to 99 employees showed that, in respect of certain best-practice elements, this sub-segment outperformed both government and not-for-profits. However, and not too dissimilar to the broader trends displayed by the not-for-profit segment, the corporate respondents were not as consistent as the approach taken by their counterparts in the government sector.
Finally, the sentiment around being concerned about grey fleets appears to be disconnected from the actual activities that are undertaken across all segments to address these concerns, Prestney said.
“That being said, we are experiencing unprecedented activity from organisations that are looking for guidance to address and solve their grey fleet issues and our expectation is that, as an increasing number of organisations undertake this process this disconnect will be addressed.”
Fleet Auto News plans to conduct the grey fleet survey annually to measure the ongoing trends and concerns about grey fleet. To find out more about the survey click here.
