The need to reduce carbon footprints on the road to net zero has for some time been a desirable for many companies, in turn boosting that organisation’s public image by enhancing its environmental credentials – but now for often harassed fleet managers such reporting is becoming not just a goal, but a requirement.

Operators of larger fleets have been required to record their carbon footprint since 2022, when the Government’s Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) made it mandatory for large corporations in the UK to disclose their climate-related financial risks – a move which affected more than 1,300 businesses.

The Government has previously indicated that it wants to extend the sustainability disclosure requirements to all companies in 2026. Companies will therefore need an accurate means to measure their fleet emissions to comply with the directive, as well as possess the strategic insights to reduce their carbon footprint.

In a bid to address the means of meeting these growing requirements across a widely diverse fleet operator environment, global fleet mobility provider, Alphabet, has launched a new web-based platform for UK customers called Carbon Manager.

End-to-end intuition

The tool has been designed to serve as an end-to-end sustainability management resource, empowering fleet operators to manage their vehicles’ net zero journey. The intuitive software provides what Alphabet describes as an unparalleled level of insight into a fleet’s overall carbon impact, while the tool also turns raw data, based on a company’s direct and indirect emissions, into real-world actionable strategies that can facilitate an overall reduction across the fleet.

Speaking exclusively to Business Motoring, Alphabet (GB) consultancy and channel development manager Caroline Sandall-Mansergh explained that the absence of an all-encompassing digital carbon reporting tool has proved a major hurdle to meeting increasing demand for accurate recording and reporting of carbon emissions.

“Carbon Manager came about as a result of the recognition of the ever-increasing burden of regulatory reporting across the piece and particularly transport – how it is increasing the admin burden for fleet managers in gathering the data to go into company reporting, but also as part of an overall ambition to reduce emissions,” Sandall-Mansergh said.

“We wanted to provide more support than a bunch of numbers on a spreadsheet – something more sophisticated, with as well as a number of predicting factors that a fleet manager could use to help test out different theories; what would be the result of doing, how would the company see its carbon change over time and so on.”

Having spent some time talking to its customers and testing who was capable of providing the kind of tool required, Alphabet partnered with Plan A, a leading corporate carbon accounting, decarbonisation and Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) reporting software provider.

Bespoke tool

One aspect that soon became clear was that existing tools available both to bespoke fleet managers and HR professionals (who often find fleet management among their responsibilities), were not specifically developed with fleet operations in mind, and this was a priority when developing Carbon Manager.

As an example Sandall-Mansergh highlights the tool’s extensive library and help section. “(Plan A) does a great deal in such areas as sustainability, giving customers access to many white papers, thought leadership articles and useful summaries of what the regulations are all about.

“(Carbon Manager) is designed to be that one location where customers can upload their data, interpret it and run through various scenarios to test out the result of different interventions that they could have, as well as being able to dip into the library and find out lots of useful information on any aspect, whether directly related to vehicles or right across the topic – it’s all in that one portal.”

Sandall-Mansergh paints a mixed picture of the level of awareness among fleet managers of the increasing burden of responsibility heading their way. “Some fleets that we are working with at the moment don’t have that regulatory burden quite yet, but it will come and it is that expectation of that forthcoming complexity of what they are going to need to do.

“By and large there’s a broad recognition of that ever increasing burden, but not necessarily everybody fully appreciates the detail of it. We also recognise that some fleet managers are purely asked for a bundle of numbers rather than anything more – they might have a central team that just says we need this data, put it into that file location and that can be the limit of their involvement.

“Equally we have a lot of fleet managers that work really closely with their sustainability colleagues and do have plans and strategies that they need to contribute towards. That was one of the main drivers behind producing something that is more sophisticated, that regardless of what you need to get involved in, you can use as much or as little of it as you want to.

“Even if you are a fleet that simply says we want to reduce our carbon without necessarily setting targets, I know I can go into the tool and say for example, what would happen if I went EV only from June? How would that impact the tail-off of our carbon, what would it look like across the fleet? Can I split that down by division – can I look at my cars separately from my commercial vehicles? The tool will enable them to do all of those things.”

Keen to transition

Sandall-Mansergh has seen a generally positive attitude towards carbon reduction among Alphabet’s fleet customers in the passenger car market – the light-commercial vehicle sector being different in retaining concerns as to whether electric vehicles can perform the same level of tasks as traditional combustion-engined models.

“The customers that we talk to are more in the mindset of when we will go EV only rather than if – almost all of them have started the journey. Almost all our fleets are well down the road of transitioning, obviously starting at a higher level, because there is more EV choice at the more expensive end of the scale,” Sandall-Mansergh said.

“We are now into the phase of the more challenging use cases, where they might be in a very low-cost vehicle, they might have a high turnover of staff, they might be in a younger age group who don’t necessarily live at home which raises potential charging issues – you have those more complicated sets of circumstances to consider in order to test whether they are ready to transition or not. But we have hardly any fleets who haven’t started transitioning, and those that haven’t are for very specific reasons, such as they might be only operating LCVs.”

While there may be increased scepticism over transition among consumers, according to Sandall-Mansergh the opposite is true amongst fleet users. “A lot of our newer customers are pushing forward as fast as they reasonably can – part of that is through driver-desire, benefit-in-kind (BIK) tax profiles presenting hefty incentives to go as low as they can (in terms of emissions) and preferably to EV.

“Now that we know the BIK tables running up to 2030, and particularly the changes on PHEVs (which will from April attract higher BIK rates), most people are now saying ‘can I renew now and go into an EV?

“Most people are finding ways to make it work while accepting for some there might be things to think about, such as planning their charging if they are higher-mileage drivers going much further from home. But we are now seeing more such drivers prepared to take that little leap and find a way to make it work – they want to and recognise that they can also lower their BIK exposure.”

Making the connection

The Carbon Manager platform will continue to be developed as it is rolled out to fleets and a future addition that Sandall-Mansergh predicts will be transformative is vehicle connectivity. “At present fleets will be reliant on data that is at their disposal and as lots of them don’t operate fuel and payment cards, they will rely on driver data or odometer readings which are always going to create some limitations

“Once you have all your vehicles connected you have an enormous amount of very useful data. You will be able to go into a lot more detail and take a much more sophisticated approach, in terms of scenarios you run through. “

She added that as well as carrying out more effective baselining to create future predictions, the platform will be able to use such data as when the vehicle was refuelled or re-energised and fuel consumption levels, factors that more challenging when solely reliant on odometer readings.

Equally important is ensuring that Carbon Manager fully interacts with all of the other business reporting tools that fleet managers have at their disposal to ensure that they have consistent reporting across all the different tools that they might be using.

Sandall-Mansergh added that Alphabet would support fleet managers to most effectively analyse and react to all the data viable to them. “We certainly don’t expect all of our fleet managers to do all this on their own… the more data the better but you’ve got to be able to effectively interpret it, and that’s our job to enable fleet managers to see where they can effect the greatest change and make the biggest difference; “We’ve noticed that if we change this in this way it will have this positive benefit…”

Expertise needed

An effect of the much greater availability of detailed data, meanwhile, will according to Sandall-Mansergh be a requirement for greater levels of expertise in the management of a company’s fleet department. Agreeing that there is no such person as a typical fleet manager, she added that across the business community there are also vastly varying levels of time resource available to look at these areas in detail.

“Some companies thankfully still do have dedicated fleet management, fleet expertise, and I think that will only increase as once you get more data you will need someone in the business that knows how to interpret it.

“Keeping that fleet expertise is important and it certainly helps us as providers working with somebody in the business where we know we can effect change because we have that internal advocate to work with.”

According to Alphabet the launch of Carbon Manager will extend emissions reporting far beyond policy compliance, offering companies a strategic advantage by identifying ways to boost efficiency and reduce running costs both now and in the future.

“The opportunities coming for fleets are enormous,” Sandall-Mansergh concluded, “but will also pose equally enormous challenges.”