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Fleet industry news round up June

27th June 2025

2025 Spending Review 

  • Chancellor Rachel Reeves launched the 2025 Spending Review (Opens in new window) , which is the UK’s first multi-year Spending Review since 2021. This sets the day-to-day budgets of Government departments over the next three years (2026-2029), used to pay staff and deliver public services, along with setting investment budgets until the end of the decade for improvements on infrastructure.

    As part of the Clean Energy Mission, the government are committing £2.6 billion to decarbonise transport over the next three years. This budget includes:

    • £1.4 billion to support the continued uptake of EVs, including zero-emission vans and heavy goods vehicles (HGVs).
    • £400 million will be used to support the rollout of charging infrastructure, building on the almost 80,000 public charging devices already available.
    • Investing £616 million to build and maintain walking and cycling infrastructure
    • Supporting the production of Sustainable Aviation Fuel in the UK by extending the Advanced Fuels Fund throughout the Spending Review Period.

    Toby Poston, chief executive of the British Vehicle Rental and Leasing Association (BVRLA), said: “The Government is clearly committed to its road transport decarbonisation targets and giving serious thought to how it achieves them.”

    The government is fully committed to meeting its legally binding carbon 

  • Further transport spending revealed in the Spending Review includes:

    •  £15.6 billion by 2031 -2032 to be allocated to support locally elected mayors in city regions invest in local transport priorities including zero emission buses, trams and local rail.
    • The largest multi-year settlement for London in over a decade announced by The Treasury, as they will be devoting £2 billion of funding over the next three years for Transport for London’s (TfL) capital renewals programme.
    • £24 billion of capital funding to be allocated from 2026-2030 to maintain and improve motorways and local roads.
    • Additionally, the Department for Transport (DfT) make use of artificial intelligence (AI) to increase automation in it's executive agencies, such as the Driving and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA).

Over 100,000 EV charging points to be added to the public network

More than 100,000 local electric vehicle chargepoints are expected to installed by government and industry over the coming years.

These will be delivered through the existing government funding from the £381 million Local Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (LEVI) Fund, and will add to the more than 80,000 public chargepoints already available in the UK.

The UK  Government is powering up the EV revolution by rolling out a chargepoint every 29 minutes and support to roll out over 100,000 local chargepoints in England.

Furthermore , over £4 billion will be invested in supporting drivers to make the switch to electric vehciles, while backing British carmakers through international trade deals – creating jobs and  boosting investment.

Oxford is making way for big changes for the way fleets operates within the city, with consultations to be soon launched over a temporary congestion charges, in addition to a working towards a significant expansion of the zero emission zone (ZEZ) (Opens in new window) in 2027, as the Oxfordshire Country Council aims to tackle air quality and growing congestion within the City.

The Oxfordshire Country Council has been exploring measures to rapidly alleviate traffic congestion until it can introduce new traffic filter measures, such as  a daily charge of £5, which would allow cars without a permit to go through six planned congestion charge locations in Oxford. EVs will also have  pay this congestion charge. to  All other vehicles including HGVs would be able to go through at all times, without having to pay the charge.

The congestion charge locations (Opens in new window) will be exactly the same as planned traffic filters, which will be put in place next year.

The Climate Change Committee (CCC) is calling on the Government to make electricity cheaper to encourage the uptake of electric vehicles.

In it's first assessment of the new Government's progress on reducing emissions, the CCC found that policies to reduce emsisions have improved since last year, and with more action the UK can hit it's legally binding climate targets and improve energy security across the country. They found that there has been ositive delivery on key areas this year, such as new car electric vehicle market share (19.4% in 2024), increased woodland creation which is up by 59%  and heat pump intallations up by 59%.

Over the past year, the UK has made progress on reducing emissions. Emissions fell 2.5% in 2024, the tenth consecutive year of sustained reduction in emissions, excluding the Covid-19 pandemic years 2020 and 2021. The UK’s emissions have halved (-50.4%) since 1990.  

Priority recommendations include making electricity cheaper, rapid expansion of low-carbon electricity system and to publish a strategy to support skills 

 

The number of employees paying company car tax has risen (Opens in new window) by 80,000 year on year,  a 10.5% increase on top of last years increase of 5.5%. The latest benefit in kind statistics show that there were 840,000 employee paying car tax in 2023/2024, compared to 760,000 in 2022-2023.

Additionally, the shift to electric company cars continued in 2023/2024, and the overall growth in company cars can be partly in result of the growing popularity of salary sacrifice schemes for cars. Last year's FN50 survey revealed salary sacrifice reached it's highest ever marketshare, accounting for 6,2% of cars on the FN50 risk fleet.

However, the overall number of company car drivers may  be higher due to 'considerable underreporting' after voluntary payrolling was introduced in April 2016.

The new HMRC data also shows that there has been a long-term downward trend in both the number of recipients and the total taxable value of car fuel from 240,000 recipients (taxable value £770 million) in 2011/2012 to 40,000 recipients (taxable value £170m) in 2023/2024. HMRC suggests that this trend likely reflects the rising fuel prices during most of this period, causing employers and employees to look more carefully at whether the value of the benefit received is worth incurring the fuel benefit tax charge. Due to lower fuel costs around 2021-2022 due to the pandemic, and a rise in EVs in 2023/2024- the total taxable value of a car fell from £200 million in 2022/2023 to £170 million in 2023/2024.

The average taxable values for car benefit and car fuel benefit in 2023/2024 were £3,910 and £3,990 respectively, down from £4,750 and £4,260 the previous year.

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