QHS has an ambitious target as a company to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2025 and we remain on-track following our investment back in 2021 in a fleet of fully electric vehicles for the significant majority of our operational teams.

Part of the transition to full battery electric vehicles is the pragmatic change over to cleaner diesel vans and fuel-efficient hybrid vehicles emitting only 30g/km of carbon dioxide, as stop gap measures until the charging infrastructure is consolidated and robust enough to move all service engineers into all-electric vans.

We are also considering new ways of working in London with the use of London made Brompton rechargeable power assisted bicycles. Fitted with paniers to hold relevant tools and equipment they will drastically reduce our emissions whilst making it quicker for service engineers to travel between properties when there is traffic congestion.

We are trialling ‘Can Track’ telematics, another state-of-the-art system to track our fleet, which along with ‘Lightfoot’ telematics monitors the whereabouts of our service engineers and their driving performance. The daily driver scoring feature is an effective behaviour training tool as it gives real-time feedback to our service engineers and has had a huge effect in reducing incident rates, while increasing fleet efficiency.

A mainstay of our carbon reduction strategy is to eliminate unnecessary travel, whilst also reducing travel through pre-planning and routing of service visits based on postcodes, thereby cutting down mileage, fuel usage and carbon emissions. We have for some considerable time been using advance vehicle telematics alongside work planning to achieve this and we are committed long term, to continually improving our operations in this respect.

Glen Douglas QHS's Fleet & Assets Manager With One Of The Company's New Lower Carbon Vans