Banking giant Santander introduced a salary sacrifice car scheme to consolidate its car offering for all its 30,000 UK staff after acquiring high-street brands, such as Abbey National, Bradford and Bingley and Alliance and Leicester.
The scheme was launched in October 2011 and by the end of January 2012 had a total of 226 cars. It is linked to the bank’s Go Green campaign, which encourages environmentally friendly behaviour by staff, and vehicle emissions are capped at 120g/km of CO2. It runs alongside, but is separate from, a conventional company car scheme for high-mileage business drivers.
Tom Manahan, fleet manager at Santander, says: “There have been no great surprises for us so far, but it is important to plan out what will happen in the event of promotions, maternity leave, secondments, career breaks, and so on. We are not dealing with a static population.
“We did a lot of notifications to employees about what was coming and had 22 orders by the first morning. The website has been a very good marketing tool and we are looking to develop that further, with a new campaign in the third quarter of this year.
“What we are introducing is a fantastic benefit at no cost to the business, so it is a no-brainer, really. And from our internal surveys, it does appear to be improving retention.”
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