The Grey Fleet Gap: The Risk You Don’t See
Driver Safety Theatre: Session 3
28th April 2026, 12:45
Transcript
Welcome to the third session in today’s Driver Safety Theatre. Thank you all for coming. Our session today is about grey fleet. We have run this theatre for six years now, and every year we do it we get more hands up with questions about grey fleet than any other topic. So the whole session today is around grey fleet risk, what your responsibilities are, and how you manage that. We have got Nigel Lawrence from Applied Driving and Emma Turness from Connells Group, one of the biggest fleets in the country, and they are going to discuss good practice and how Connells deal with it.
Thank you, Simon.
Thank you. Good afternoon everybody. Between us today we have the job of trying to make grey fleet as exciting and engaging as we can, which is a task in itself. I am Nigel Lawrence, Strategic Partnerships Director at Applied Driving. We work closely with Connells to help deliver the systems and support they need to manage this subject in a robust way. Emma, over to you.
Yes, thank you Nigel. I am Emma Turnis, Group Fleet Manager for Connells Group. I am responsible for around two and a half thousand company cars on the road and four and a half thousand grey fleet employees, those people using their own cars for company business.
Connells is the UK’s largest property services business. We deal with property from cradle to grave. We will sell your property, buy your property, survey it, and even sell you the insurance afterwards. I have been with the group for over 20 years now. Historically my role was just the operational part of the fleet, but around three years ago the fleet director left and I inherited it all, so I now deal with both the operational and strategic parts of the group fleet.
Lovely, thank you. You have already outdone me with your introduction, that is a great start. We do not want to rely on slides today, we want this to be a conversational session so we can understand Emma’s experience and how Connells manage grey fleet.
We understand it is a significant driver population at Connells. Can you give the audience an understanding of how long you have been managing this within the business and what approach you currently take?
Yes. Historically we have always looked at grey fleet, but for the last 10 years it has been taken more seriously in the business. Twenty years ago we used to have a spreadsheet, and it was horrific, probably the largest and worst spreadsheet in the world. People used to send in insurance certificates and it was very manual.
About 10 years ago we collaborated with ADT and outsourced the function of grey fleet and driver licence checking. We have a policy with a three step process. Drivers are asked to provide their documents and they receive a series of emails, including reminders that their documents are due. If they do not provide their documents by the set date, we stop the car allowance. That policy seems to work, as you can see from our compliance.
Thank you, Emma. And alongside that document process, I assume you check licences as well, making it a full compliance programme?
Yes, we do. Company car drivers have their licences checked, and with grey fleet ADT sends a series of emails as well. We also check road fund licence and the validity of business insurance, which is key for grey fleet.
From my experience, buy-in from the top is really key for success in delivering schemes like this. Did you get that buy-in from above?
Yes, absolutely. The executive board, 90 percent of them take the cash allowance, so they know the policy and comply with it. A few years ago we had a situation where a surveyor had a heart attack at the wheel on a Saturday morning. He veered off the road and hit a lady with a buggy. Everyone was okay in the end, but on the Monday morning the police were asking for documents.
In any incident, people ask what they were doing and whether they were on business. If they were on business, the company must have checked their documents. So situations like that do happen, and when they do, the exec listens. It helps reinforce why we do this.
Yes, and grey fleet can sometimes become the poor relation in mixed fleets, missing opportunities to manage risk properly. From a safety perspective, how do you get that message across about legal and moral responsibility?
When employees join the business as cash allowance drivers, we send a welcome email and allowance handbook. The process is outlined there and they are given a link to ADT to provide driving licence and insurance details.
When we first worked with ADT, it was important drivers knew where emails were coming from so they did not treat them as spam. We explained the purpose and sent a series of emails with context about why we do this.
We also phased the rollout, around 500 employees per week, so we were not overwhelmed administratively. Once embedded, it is important to maintain documentation checks. We send reminders, including a final step where allowance is stopped if documents are not provided.
Policies are on the intranet, sent on joining, and refreshed annually. Nobody can say they do not know the policy because we communicate it regularly.
Policies are not exciting reading, but visibility is key because things change, whether legislation or internal process changes.
Exactly. Communication and continuous reinforcement are key.
Can you talk about vehicle policy and restrictions? Do you have CO2 or mileage limits?
Yes. CO2 is currently focused on company cars under our ESG committee, but we are planning to introduce incentives for grey fleet CO2 emissions next year. We are also in discussions about lower CO2 vehicles, though that will be a challenge with executives who tend to take cash and drive larger engines.
At the moment, vehicles must align with company image. We set a maximum age of 10 years and 80,000 miles.
Do you allow exceptions?
Yes, we are not rigid. If someone joins with an existing lease or a car near the limit, we have conversations and allow flexibility. It is about being controlled but not overly restrictive.
Finally, I want to come back to withholding car allowance. That can be difficult to implement across stakeholders.
So, how long have you had that in place at Connells? And how difficult was it to implement in the first instance?
I think it’s probably been in place for six or seven years, at least. It was actually one of the ideas from the exec. If they’re not going to provide their documents, we don’t pay them. It filtered on from there really. It took a while to implement it, but people know the rules now, and we don’t back pay.
Basically, if somebody has missed their allowance and they haven’t got their documents in place for that particular month, we don’t back pay. They come to us and say, can we have our allowance now, here’s our business insurance, can we have it back paid, and we don’t. Once the word is out, people learn. It’s not hard to upload your business insurance.
Can I have a show of hands? How many of you have a grey fleet management policy within your existing organisation, and can you keep your hand up if you withhold car allowance or expense payments for non-compliance? Interesting, the only person who had their hand up is a colleague of Emma’s, so he gets away with it.
It’s really interesting because that just goes to show it’s not a common place, it’s not something that applies across the board. But when we look at these compliance figures for Connells, who have been on this journey for some time, it’s clearly been a really key metric in achieving that success.
This session today is very focused on compliance, meeting legal obligations, but it has to go beyond that. Ultimately, why are we in business? We want people to get to work safely and get home safely, regardless of whether they’re an operational driver or grey fleet.
So what do you do at Connells in terms of giving extra support, like training and that kind of thing, to your grey fleet? Do you do any initiatives around that space?
Driver training has always been focused on company car drivers. Last year we decided that we would include our grey fleet drivers. Some of them liked it, some of them didn’t. But we decided that actually we’re putting these rules in place, we’re going to stop your allowance if you’re not providing the documents, and they need to be treated like company car drivers.
We’ve put them all in one basket really and we train them as well. We’ve got a training regime where if they’re high-risk drivers, they’re seen the same as high-risk company car drivers and we send them on extended training. Hopefully they feel included in that as well.
Typically a grey fleet may often be a much lower mileage profile in terms of business miles. There’s a risk it doesn’t feel inclusive, and that focus is more on operational fleet with cameras and telematics. Did your drivers engage positively in that sense, beyond compliance, actually feeling that you’re looking after their safety?
Initially, no. Let’s be honest, nobody wants to do driver training. But once they realised it did enhance things, and we had a broker do an online session, once they answered questions it then fed into individual training, the stats came back and they were really good.
Once somebody engages, once you get employee engagement, then you’re good. But that’s the difficult thing, employee engagement.
We’ve touched on that a couple of times. Winning the hearts and minds of drivers can be really difficult. Have you leveraged other cultural things within the business to keep grey fleet consistent, so it doesn’t just drop off over time?
I think talking to them helps. Stories like the surveyor I’ve just told you. We also had an estate agent, a young estate agent, speeding down a dual carriageway. He was stopped by the police and asked where he was going.
He had a bald tyre, not completely worn but effectively illegal. They asked where he was going and he said he was late for a viewing. They impounded his car because he was driving grey fleet, speeding, and on company business. He also didn’t have the relevant insurance.
So I think stories like that, when you talk to employees and explain we’re not doing this for fun, I don’t want it on my desk any more than they do, that is where you get engagement.
In a world of too many digital communications, actually talking face to face and doing sessions like this brings it to life in a way that adds more value than another PDF landing in your inbox.
Thinking about your role within Connells, what’s been the biggest challenge managing grey fleet and how did you overcome it?
In terms of grey fleet, there are lots of challenges, but I would say employees saying they don’t receive the emails. We didn’t receive this email. But we have a series of emails, email one, email two, email three, and then they receive the final email saying they’re not going to get their car allowance.
We record where we send all emails, and we send them to both business and personal email addresses provided when they join. So they can’t say they haven’t received them. Getting compliance, that has been the most difficult part, people saying they haven’t received the information.
Within Connells, how much support did the health and safety stakeholder group give in terms of sponsoring this?
We have regular reviews. With my accident management company, health and safety, brokers and insurance leads all come together. We sit around the table and discuss positives and negatives.
With driver training, I’ve had bursaries from my insurance company and brokers. If you talk to people, they like to see how you’re going to spend the money on driver training.
So no single stakeholder group owns it. It touches lots of areas in the business.
To close for the audience today, what would be your golden piece of advice on managing grey fleet?
Stay firm. Stay firm to your policy, and if you’re firm, eventually people get the message.
Consistency is key. These things aren’t achieved overnight, it takes time.
What is your policy for drivers that receive points whilst working, and what’s your policy around accidents? Do you investigate those drivers, and if they have a number of accidents is there a process you follow?
In terms of drivers that receive points whilst driving, high-risk drivers are checked regularly by ADT. Drivers are advised or must tell us when they receive points. At that point we inform ADT and their checks become more frequent because they are higher risk.
In terms of accidents with grey fleet, we don’t actually ask employees to inform us in the grey fleet policy at the moment, so I haven’t got that in place currently.
Hi. You mentioned quite a few times that your main method of communicating with your workforce is via emails. How do you manage email overload and reach the whole organisation, especially as many people are out and about rather than office based?
We do have that issue where people say they didn’t receive the email. Employees receive emails from ADT and from us, so I don’t fully accept that excuse.
With company car drivers, we also use text messaging via mobile phones, but we don’t do that with grey fleet drivers at the moment. It is email only at present.
I think email is still the easiest method for delivering this kind of communication. The key is the messaging itself, keeping it succinct, making it clear why we are doing it and what we need from them.
Also, make it more graphical and less text heavy. We all scan emails, so simplicity matters. Other methods like town halls or stand downs could help if the organisation allows it.
Hello, my name’s Lewis. We’ve only got about 18 grey fleet drivers, so a bit different to you. What do you have in place to ensure drivers’ vehicles are fit for use? An MOT is only an annual check. Are they required to do weekly, monthly or physical inspections of their vehicles?
So, how long have you had that in place at Connells? And how difficult was it to implement in the first instance?
I think it’s probably been in place for six or seven years at least. It was actually one of the ideas from the exec. If they’re not going to provide their documents, we don’t pay them. It was a good idea, and it filtered on from there.
It took a while to implement, but people know the rules now. We don’t back pay. If someone has missed their allowance and hasn’t got their documents in place for that particular month, they come to us and say, can we have our allowance now, here is our business insurance, can we have it back paid, and we don’t. Once the word is out, people learn. It is not hard to upload your business insurance.
At that point, how many of you have a grey fleet management policy within your existing organisation, and can you keep your hand up if you withhold car allowance or expense payments for non-compliance?
Interesting, the only person who had their hand up is a colleague of Emma’s, so he gets away with it. It is really interesting because it shows it is not common. It is not something that applies across the board. When we look at these compliance figures for Connells, who have been on this journey for some time, it has clearly been a key metric in achieving that success.
This session is very focused on compliance, meeting legal obligations. But it has to go beyond that. Ultimately, why are we in business? We want people to get to work safely and get home safely, regardless of whether they are operational drivers or grey fleet.
So what do you do at Connells in terms of giving extra support, for example training, to your grey fleet? Do you do any initiatives around that space?
Driver training has always been focused on company car drivers. Last year we decided we would include our grey fleet drivers. Some liked it, some did not. We decided that we are putting these rules in place, and if you are not providing the documents we stop your allowance. They need to be treated like company car drivers.
We put them all in one basket and we train them as well. We have a training regime so if they are high-risk drivers they are seen the same as high-risk company car drivers and we send them on extended training. Hopefully they feel included in that.
Typically, a grey fleet may have a much lower mileage profile, so there is a risk it does not feel inclusive compared to operational fleets with cameras and telematics. Did you feel your drivers engaged positively, beyond just legal compliance, in terms of safety?
Initially, no, nobody wants to do driver training. But once they realised it did enhance things, and after an online session and individual follow-up training, the stats came back really well. Once someone engages, and you get employee engagement, then you are in a good place. That is the difficult thing, engagement.
We have touched on that a couple of times, winning hearts and minds. Have you leveraged other cultural things within the business to keep grey fleet consistent, so it does not drop off over time?
I think talking to them helps. Stories like the surveyor I mentioned earlier. We also had an estate agent, a young one, speeding down a dual carriageway. He was stopped by the police. He had a tyre that was not fully legal. He said he was late for a viewing. His car was impounded because he was speeding and on grey fleet business, and he did not have the relevant insurance.
Stories like that help when you talk to employees and explain we are not doing this for fun. I do not want it on my desk any more than they do. Once you sit and talk to them, that is where you get engagement.
In a world of too many digital communications, being able to talk face to face brings it to life more than another PDF in an inbox.
So what has been the biggest challenge for you managing grey fleet, and how did you overcome it?
In terms of grey fleet, a lot of it is employees saying they do not receive the emails. But we send a series of emails, and we send them to both business and personal email addresses, so they cannot really say they have not received them. That has been one of the biggest challenges.
Within Connells, how much support did the health and safety stakeholder group give in sponsoring this?
We have regular reviews. With accident management, health and safety, brokers and insurance leads, we all sit around the table and discuss. We talk about positives and negatives. With driver training, I have had bursaries from my insurance company and brokers, so we negotiate those things as well.
