In July, Luton Council published a new driving-at-work procedure, and one line in it sums up the law well: the car a member of staff drives for work, “regardless of ownership, is regarded as a place of work”, so the council owes the same duty of care to people driving their own cars as to anyone in a council vehicle.¹

Every employer is in the same position, and grey-fleet duty of care carries higher stakes than the mileage bill. In 2025, 445 people were killed on Britain’s roads in collisions involving someone driving for work: 29% of all road deaths.²

What does duty of care cover when staff drive their own cars?

HSE guidance says the law applies to company and grey fleet vehicles alike, and your risk assessment should look at the journey, the driver and the vehicle.³ For a staff member’s own car, that means being able to show they hold a valid licence, their insurance covers business use, and the car is taxed, MOT’d and roadworthy. (Standard social, domestic and pleasure cover usually excludes business use, so it’s worth asking to see the policy.)

A lot of public-sector driving runs through private cars: community nurses, social workers, environmental health officers and therapists on home visits. In June the NHS Staff Council asked employers to agree extra fuel support for staff “who use their own, or a lease vehicle for work purposes”.⁴

Where does the duty land day to day?

The duty sits with the organisation, but day to day it lands on managers. The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust’s driving policy puts it directly: “Those who have managerial responsibilities hold the duty of care for their staff and to the Trust.”⁵ That’s often a ward manager or team lead with a spreadsheet of expiry dates.

A 2017 Wales Audit Office review of grey fleet at the Welsh Blood Service found “no formal checks of drivers’ licences and insurance” and no arrangement for checking MOTs.⁶ The trust accepted most of the recommendations, and it’s an old report, but I’d expect plenty of fleet managers to recognise the picture.

Why is checking a private car so hard?

You can check a licence against DVLA records. A car is harder: you see an insurance certificate once a year and won’t know if someone moves to a policy without business cover halfway through, and an MOT only shows the car passed on the day of the test. In many organisations that leaves an annual declaration from the driver.

How does a pool car change the evidence?

A pool car is a vehicle you own or lease, so its business insurance, servicing and MOT are arranged by you or your leasing company, not by each driver. That’s one set of vehicle checks, however many people drive it. We add the driver and trip records: staff verify their licence and ID once in the Kerbway app before their first booking, and every trip is logged, so councils and NHS trusts can show who drove which vehicle and when. That’s far easier to produce from a booking record than from a folder of photocopies.⁷

A pool won’t cover every journey. A community nurse starting a round of home visits from home may still be better off in their own car, and fatigue and journey planning stay with you whoever owns the vehicle. Trips that start and end at the same base, like the cross-site meeting or the clinic run, are the easiest to move.

What should you do next?

• Count how many staff claimed mileage last year, and how many of them have a current licence, insurance and MOT check on file.
• Ask who holds the duty of care for each team, and whether they know it.
• Pick out the journeys that start and finish at the same base: those are your pool candidates. The grey-fleet calculator will put a cost on them.

If you run a grey-fleet duty-of-care process that works well, I’d like to hear how you do it.

Read this on Kerbway.com, or Book a demo.

LONDON, 4 November 2026. Kerbway, a new UK business-to-business fleet-sharing technology company, has launched after raising an initial £500,000 from angel investors, and plans to help organisations get far more use from the vehicles they already run.

The company is targeting NHS trusts, local authorities and property developers with a technology-enabled service designed to cut the cost and emissions of business travel.

Kerbway’s proposition is simple: make existing vehicles bookable, keyless and shared, without requiring organisations to replace their fleets or invest in expensive new infrastructure.

Kerbway runs an asset-light model: it owns no vehicles, and provides the technology and service that let organisations share the ones they own or lease.

Its platform combines mobile booking, keyless access, automated driver licence checks and fleet management information to make shared vehicles convenient for users and easier for organisations to manage.

Three markets, one opportunity

For NHS trusts, Kerbway offers an alternative to expensive employee mileage reimbursement and taxi journeys, while improving duty of care and access to safe, modern vehicles.

For local authorities, the opportunity extends beyond reducing fleet costs and emissions. Vehicles used during working hours could also be made available to communities outside normal operating hours, creating potential additional revenue.

For property developers, Kerbway provides managed shared mobility services that can reduce parking demand and improve the sustainability of residential and mixed-use developments. Such schemes may also help developers meet transport-related Section 106 planning obligations, where shared mobility measures form part of an agreed planning arrangement.

The founders and the plan

Kerbway’s three founders have more than 85 years’ experience between them.

Marc Roberts, CEO, brings more than 20 years’ technology leadership experience, including a decade leading car-sharing technology businesses.

George Webb, Chief Revenue Officer, has over 35 years’ experience in fleet management and commercial leadership.

Rachel Percival, Chief Customer and Operating Officer, brings 30 years’ experience in customer experience and operational management.

I’ve spent years building car-sharing technology, and schemes succeed or fail on the details: how easy it is to book, whether the car is there when you need it, and whether anyone can see what it costs. Kerbway is built around getting those right, on the vehicles an organisation already runs.

Marc Roberts, CEO of Kerbway

The £500,000 raised will fund the launch and the first customer pilots, the first stage of a five-year growth plan.

Five founding pilot partners wanted

Kerbway is now inviting five organisations to join its founding pilot programme, with particular interest in NHS trusts, local authorities and property developers.

For public sector organisations, typical pilots will involve approximately 10 vehicles over 12 months, with performance measured against agreed cost, utilisation, duty-of-care and emissions objectives.

Property developer pilots will focus on providing convenient shared transport for residents and occupiers, supporting sustainable travel and reducing dependence on private-car ownership.

Organisations interested in becoming one of Kerbway’s five founding pilot partners are invited to make contact.

About Kerbway

Founded in 2026 and headquartered in the UK, Kerbway provides the technology and service layer that turns the pool fleets of businesses, councils, NHS trusts and universities into smart, app-based shared fleets that replace grey-fleet mileage. Drivers verify once, then find, book and unlock vehicles from their phone; organisations keep control of their vehicles, owned or leased, their data and full reporting on utilisation, cost and CO2. Unlike traditional car clubs, Kerbway owns no vehicles, so vehicles cannot be withdrawn if an operator's economics change.

Media enquiries: see the press page or contact hello@kerbway.com.

Read this on Kerbway.com, or Book a demo.

Nothing in the Autumn Budget mentions shared or pool fleets. No car clubs, no shared mobility, not a line. But read the motoring measures together and most of them nudge organisations the same way: away from paying staff to drive their own cars, and towards vehicles the organisation owns and shares.

Here’s how I read it, for anyone running a council, NHS or business fleet.

The grey fleet got dearer

The 55p a mile tax-free rate for business journeys in staff’s own cars, raised in May for the first time since 2011, is now permanent. The rate for miles above 10,000 a year also goes up, from 25p to 35p, from April next year. That’s a 40% rise, and it lands hardest on the people who drive furthest for work: community nurses, site inspectors, anyone covering a large patch.

Take someone doing 6,000 business miles a year in their own car. At the old 45p rate you could reimburse them £2,700 tax-free. At 55p it’s £3,300. Whatever you’re paying per business mile, if you pay at the approved rates it’s up by more than a fifth.

If you’ve never put your reimbursed cost per mile next to the running cost of a pool car, now’s a good time. That comparison got a lot more interesting this week. (It’s also an easy one to get wrong, because the pool car’s costs are visible on a budget line and the grey fleet’s are scattered across expense claims.)

Company cars and the clock on the first-year allowance

Company car tax on electric cars goes up a point to 10% in 2030-31. Fleet and leasing bodies asked for it to stay at 9% and didn’t get it. Every point makes an allocated company car a little less attractive compared with a pool vehicle that nobody has as a perk, though pool status depends on private use being incidental, so take advice if you’re planning to open a pool car up to wider use.

For business fleets there’s a date to note. The 100% first-year allowance for new zero-emission cars still ends on 31 March 2027 for companies (5 April for unincorporated businesses). Buy an electric pool car before then and you can deduct the full cost against profits in one go. That’s five months from now. Councils and NHS trusts don’t pay corporation tax, so this one is for business fleets only.

Charging didn’t do so well

VAT on public and workplace charging stays at 20%. The 0% rate that’s been extended to July 2027 applies to household electricity only, so a fleet charging at the depot sees none of it.

The Government is putting £100m towards lower-powered public chargers. The Treasury reckons that’s worth about £150 a year to a driver without a driveway, and it should help fleet cars and vans that charge on the street. Chargepoints also keep their 100% business rates relief for ten years from April 2026.

Fuel is the other side of the sum. The 5p fuel duty cut is extended to 1 July 2027 and diesel passed £2 a litre in October, so the petrol-to-electric saving is slightly smaller in the short term. It’s still there.

The catch: pay-per-mile road tax

From April 2028 electric cars will pay Electric Vehicle Excise Duty (eVED), a charge by the mile: 3p for battery electric cars and 1.5p for plug-in hybrids, on top of existing road tax. It’s paid by the registered keeper, so for a shared car that’s the organisation that owns it.

For a pool car that matters, because the whole point of one is that it gets used. A car doing 10,000 miles a year would pick up £300 a year, and the more people it serves, the more it adds.

There are some useful bits of detail. A mileage estimation tool will be available at launch. An opt-in scheme called eVED Connect will read mileage from the car’s own connectivity so nobody has to report it by hand. Automated refunds, for overestimated mileage or a sale, are promised by 2030. And the Government says guidance for fleet operators is due later this year.

What I’ll be reading first when it arrives is how it treats a car with dozens of drivers. Fleet managers have said they still don’t know how mileage estimation will work for shared vehicles, and it would be good to have that settled before the rules do.

What’s next

If you run a fleet, three things are worth an afternoon:

• Work out what your grey fleet actually costs per business mile at 55p and 35p, and put it next to what a pool car would cost to run.
• If you’re a business buying electric cars, decide before 31 March 2027 whether the first-year allowance is worth planning around.
• Add a line for eVED in your 2028 numbers now, even if it’s a placeholder until the guidance lands.

Read this on Kerbway.com, or Book a demo.

If you’ve been asked to take a few cars out of the fleet to save money, the easy answer is to cut evenly: one car from each site, or 10% across the board. It’s also how someone ends up without a car on the morning they need one. And with the tax-free rate for staff driving their own cars now 55p a mile for the first 10,000 miles (up from 45p in April), every journey that slips back onto the grey fleet costs more than it did.

Right-sizing works when you remove the vehicles that aren’t earning their keep, and you need usage data to see which ones those are.

Averages hide the problem

Average utilisation is a poor guide. Two cars at 50% look the same on a spreadsheet, but one might be busy every morning and idle every afternoon, while the other is used hard two days a week and parked the rest. Remove the second and nobody may notice. Remove the first and a team loses its morning car.

Measure first, then cut

When every booking is logged, you can see what an average hides:

• which vehicles are booked rarely enough to move or remove
• when demand peaks, and how many cars are actually out at once at those times
• which sites are short of cars and which are carrying spare

Give it long enough to cover your busy periods, since a quiet August tells you little about January. Kerbway allocates every booking to a department, project or cost centre and reports utilisation by vehicle, so you can build this view from your own pool’s data.

Why a smaller shared pool can cover the same journeys

Shared cars cover more demand per vehicle than allocated ones, because teams rarely all peak at once. Say three teams each hold three cars, nine in all. Each needs all three at its busiest, but one peaks on Monday mornings, one midweek and one on Friday afternoons. If the booking data shows the most cars ever out at once across all three teams is six, a shared pool of six covers the same journeys. Each team can also borrow beyond its old three when it needs to.

That’s an example, and some teams do peak together (everyone needs a car the week an inspection programme starts). If yours do, the data will show it before you cut.

Cutting too far costs more

A pool that’s too small fails quietly. Staff can’t get a car, so they drive their own and claim mileage, and the saving on the vehicle comes back as expenses. Watch for bookings that couldn’t be met and for mileage claims creeping back up in the months after a cut. Either one means you’ve gone too far.

What’s next

• Pull three to six months of booking or key-log records and find the most cars out at once at each site.
• Compare that peak with the cars you hold. The gap is your room to cut.
• After any change, track mileage claims alongside bookings for a quarter.

If you’ve right-sized a pool, I’d like to hear what the data showed that you didn’t expect.

Read this on Kerbway.com, or Book a demo.

Ask a facilities team where their pool cars lose time and the answer is rarely the cars. It’s the keys. Collecting them, signing them out, chasing the person who took one home in their coat pocket. The key cupboard sets a ceiling on how often a shared vehicle gets shared, and most organisations never measure it.

Moving the key onto the driver’s phone removes much of that. It also helps with two problems that don’t look like key problems until you go looking: showing HMRC that a pool car really is a pool car, and showing you’ve checked who’s driving.

What does a physical key cost you?

A key has to live somewhere, be handed over by someone and come back before the next driver can go. Each of those steps is a chance to lose time:

• The car’s free in the diary, but the key is in another building (or in yesterday’s driver’s bag).
• Someone has to be at reception to hand keys out, so a 7am start for a site visit means a member of staff in at 7am too, or the key going home the night before.
• The sign-out sheet records who took the key. It doesn’t say who drove, how far, or when the car actually came back.

Then there’s losing them. When the RAC surveyed 2,068 drivers in 2018, 1 in 20 admitted to permanently losing a car key, and those who bought a replacement paid £176 on average, with transponder keys costing up to £500. A pool car key passes through far more hands than a private one, and while it’s missing the car is off the road.

When the key goes home, so can the tax bill

For HMRC to treat a car as a pool car, with no benefit-in-kind charge for the people who drive it, it has to meet five conditions. Among them: it’s used by more than one employee, it isn’t ordinarily used by one of them to the exclusion of the others, any private use is merely incidental, and it’s not normally kept overnight at or near anyone’s home. Fail any one and it isn’t a pool car.

HMRC’s guidance accepts taking a pool car home the evening before an early business trip. It also warns that doing it too often breaks the overnight condition, and its rule of thumb is that a car taken home on 60% or more of nights is “normally” kept there. Well before that point, the journeys home are unlikely to count as incidental.

A key in a cupboard (or missing from it) tells you very little about where a car spent the night. A booking record for every trip, on a car you can locate, tells you a lot more. If you’re ever asked to show that your pool cars are pool cars, that’s the evidence you’ll want. And if you think some of yours are drifting towards one person’s driveway, take advice sooner rather than later.

Duty of care doesn’t stop at the cupboard

HSE’s guidance is that health and safety law covers driving for work, and that it applies to staff in their own cars (the grey fleet) as much as to company vehicles. Part of that is knowing your drivers are licensed and your vehicles are safe to use.

A key cupboard will hand a key to anyone who can reach it. With keyless access, only drivers who’ve completed the licence and ID check in the Kerbway app can book, so the check happens once, up front, and nobody’s licence photocopy is sitting in a drawer.

What changes when the key is your phone?

With Kerbway, the driver finds an available vehicle in the app, books it and unlocks it with their phone. There’s no cupboard and no handover:

• Access is granted for the booking and revoked automatically when it ends, so there’s no key to keep or forget to hand back.
• Early starts and late finishes for business trips don’t depend on who’s at reception.
• Every unlock is logged against a driver and a booking, so you can see who used which car and when.
• Each booking is costed and allocated to the team or cost centre that made it, which is the number you need to put the pool next to what you pay in mileage claims.

The kit is hardware-agnostic and fits to the vehicles you already run, owned or leased, so there’s nothing to replace. You can see the full journey here, or what it looks like for facilities and estates teams who inherited the key cupboard along with the cars.

Why not use the carmaker’s digital key?

Phone car keys already exist on some newer cars. The Car Connectivity Consortium, whose members include Apple and Samsung as well as carmakers such as BMW, Hyundai and Volkswagen, publishes a Digital Key standard, and its third release in 2021 added hands-free unlocking over ultra-wideband so the phone can stay in your pocket.

Those keys are built for an owner sharing a car with family or a friend. A pool needs one system across a mix of makes and ages (including cars with no digital key at all), access that follows a booking rather than a person, a licence check before anyone can unlock, and records the organisation can report on.

Questions to ask before you go keyless

Whoever you talk to, these are worth asking:

• How does a car unlock in an underground car park, or anywhere with no mobile signal?
• What happens if a driver’s phone dies partway through a trip, with the car locked at a site?
• Where does the original key live once the car is keyless, and who can get to it?
• Does the kit fit the vehicles you actually have, including older models and vans, and what does fitting involve?
• If someone leaves, or loses their licence, how quickly can they be stopped from booking?
• Who can see trip records, how long are they kept, and what will you tell staff about them?

What’s next

If your pool cars still run on physical keys, a few numbers will tell you what the cupboard is costing:

• Count a week of handovers, and how many of them needed someone to be there.
• Check how many nights each pool car spent away from base last month.
• Add up how many keys you’ve replaced in the last year, and what they cost.

If you’ve already moved your pool cars off physical keys, what caught you out? I’d like to hear it.

Read this on Kerbway.com, or Book a demo.

Ask a fleet manager how many vehicles they run and they will count the vans, the pool cars and the leases. The biggest fleet in most organisations never makes that list, because the organisation doesn’t own a single vehicle in it.

What is grey fleet?

Grey fleet is any privately owned vehicle used for business journeys, typically an employee’s own car, driven on work trips and claimed back at a pence-per-mile rate. Commuting doesn’t count; the site visit, the cross-town meeting and the community appointment do.

It is called grey because it sits in a grey area: the organisation pays for the mileage and carries legal responsibility for the journey, but the vehicle itself is invisible: nobody procured it, nobody maintains it, and in many organisations nobody has checked it is roadworthy or insured for business use.

How big is the UK’s grey fleet?

Bigger than almost anyone assumes. The last major national study, Getting to Grips with Grey Fleet, produced by the Energy Saving Trust for the BVRLA, put it at around 14 million cars, roughly 40% of all vehicles on UK roads, covering some 12 billion business miles a year and costing employers about £5.5 billion annually in mileage claims and car allowances.¹

The public sector alone accounted for around 1.5 billion grey-fleet miles and £786 million a year, driven largely by NHS, local-authority and civil service staff.¹ In NHS primary care the fleet is almost entirely grey fleet, covering an estimated 155 million miles every year.²

What does grey fleet actually cost?

More than the mileage claim suggests and, as of this year, noticeably more than it used to. From April 2026 HMRC’s approved mileage rate rose from 45p to 55p per mile for the first 10,000 miles, the first increase since 2011.³ Every grey-fleet mile now costs a fifth more overnight, before you add:

• Admin: collecting, checking and processing per-mile claims across hundreds of drivers.
• Compliance overhead: licence, insurance and MOT checks done properly (see below), or risk carried silently if they aren’t.
• No asset in return: unlike a pool vehicle, the spend buys no capacity. It is pure per-mile cost, and it rises with every journey.

Meanwhile, most organisations that do own pool cars leave them idle for the vast majority of the week, paying twice: once for the parked asset, once for the grey-fleet mile that replaced it.

Who is responsible when staff drive their own cars for work?

The employer. Under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, the duty of care for work-related driving applies exactly the same whether the vehicle is company-owned, leased, hired or the employee’s own car.⁴ In practice that means being able to evidence that every grey-fleet driver holds a valid licence, that the vehicle is taxed, MOT’d and roadworthy, and that the driver’s insurance covers business use (ordinary social-domestic-and-commuting cover does not). Research suggests only around one in three organisations run these checks regularly.⁴

If a grey-fleet driver has a serious incident on a work journey and the paperwork isn’t there, it is the employer answering the questions.

Why does grey fleet matter for net zero?

Because grey-fleet cars are old. The average grey-fleet vehicle is 8.2 years old, against roughly 18 months for a typical company car: older, more polluting and less safe than almost any alternative.¹ Nationally the grey fleet was estimated to emit 3.6 million tonnes of CO2 a year, plus around 8,000 tonnes of NOx, about twice the emissions of London’s entire bus fleet.¹

That is why grey-fleet reduction is now written into public-sector policy: every NHS trust and integrated care board must have a sustainable-travel strategy in its Green Plan by the end of 2026, and council fleet-decarbonisation strategies routinely name the grey-fleet-to-shared-EV-pool shift explicitly.²

How do you reduce grey fleet?

The playbook is well established:

1. Measure it. Baseline your grey-fleet miles, cost and CO2. Most organisations have never totalled it.
2. Remove the journeys you can. Online meetings, better scheduling, public transport and active travel for the trips that suit them.
3. Shift the rest onto vehicles you control. A shared pool of vehicles you own or lease, booked and unlocked self-service so it is easier than taking your own car, turns an unmanaged per-mile cost into a measured, compliant, decarbonisable fleet.

Step three is where most schemes fail: if booking a pool car means a key cabinet, a sign-out sheet and a walk to reception, staff will keep driving their own. Making the pool fleet the path of least resistance is exactly what Kerbway does for councils, NHS trusts and businesses: keyless access, in-app booking, automatic driver checks and the utilisation and CO2 reporting to evidence the reduction.

Grey fleet is the only fleet that gets bigger the less you manage it. The moment you measure it, the case for sharing the vehicles you already run makes itself.

Rachel Percival, Kerbway

Want the numbers for your own organisation? Our Grey-Fleet Cost & Carbon Calculator puts a cost and a CO2 figure on your grey-fleet miles and models what a shared pool of the vehicles you already run would save.

Read this on Kerbway.com, or Book a demo.