The potential savings were identified in a British Gas study, conducted by the Transport Research Laboratory, which also found that a move to using 10% EVs would reduce fleet CO2 emissions in Britain by more than 5% each year.

And the company’s data shows that converting 50% of a fleet to electric vehicles would result in an average annual cost saving of £1,753,000 for companies and reduce CO2 emissions in Britain by around 26% (2,320,000 tonnes).

Some industries could achieve greater benefits than others from a 10% switch to electric vehicles, according to the data. Fleets in the financial services sector stand to make the highest average fleet saving at £484,000 a year and could cut annual CO2 emissions by 5.7%, or 800 tonnes.

The other top five sectors that would benefit from converting their fleet to electric vehicles, according to a combination of percentage cost and CO2 savings, are, the emergency services/NHS Trusts, service industries (including IT, Leisure and Media), heavy industries and architecture /construction.

Looking purely at financial savings, the sector that stands to benefit the most is transport and distribution, where companies can save on average £486,000 annually if they convert 10% of their fleet to electric power, and £2.43m if they introduce 50%.

Colin Marriott, fleet general manager at British Gas, said: ‘This report shows that businesses, under pressure to reduce both costs and carbon emissions, cannot afford to ignore the benefits of electric vehicles. Electric vehicles offer us so many benefits as a business that we’re introducing them into our own fleet and aim to have 1,400 by 2015 as part of our drive to reduce fleet carbon emissions by 25%.’

British Gas is to convert 10% of its 14,000 LCV fleet to electric over next three years, following a trial of Nissan's e-NV200 earlier this year.