An NHS trust is taking a leading role in transitioning its fleet to electric vehicles after a major project to install charging infrastructure.

L-R: Scott Duncan from Mer with Lee Cant of NTW Solutions

Cumbria, Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust is advancing its rollout of electric vehicles after Mer installed charge points at 13 of its sites.

Mer worked on the project with NTW Solutions, the subsidiary responsible for providing support services such as estates and facilities management and car leasing to the trust.

Lee Cant, commercial director of NTW Solutions, said: “Working with Mer to procure these chargers has been an enabler for us to move forward with our decarbonisation strategy. We benchmark ourselves against other trusts in the region and we know that wae are out in front in terms of fleet electrification thanks in part to this project.”

NTW Solutions runs a fleet of 1,400 lease cars for employees at the trust as well as around 90 service vehicles ranging from pool cars to vans and trucks – and is seeing growing take-up of electric vehicles.

“In total, 40% of the lease cars are now fully electric or plug-in hybrids, while about a quarter of the service fleet is the same,” added Cant. “Some of the service vehicles are larger and they need full payloads for operations like laundry, so they won’t be electrified yet, we’ll concentrate for now on the lighter vans.”

Mer won a competitive tender to deliver the charge points after meeting all the key criteria – including the ability for the trust to set different tariffs. It’s offering free charging for fleet vehicles, a preferential rate for staff and a higher rate for visitors.

“It was imperative that we could set different rates for public charging, staff charging, and also for our fleet service vehicles,” added Cant. “It was important to be able to differentiate for different use cases and also to have different methods of accessing the chargers, from contactless payment to RFID cards and key fobs.

“We were also keen on having a viable management system that we could extract data from, in order to ascertain which chargers were the most popular and identify where we might need additional infrastructure to meet demand.”

NTW also explained that working with Mer had significantly increased the speed of electrification and the decarbonisation of the fleet.

“We had a lot of wards that were not prepared to go electric until there were chargers on site. For example, we have a 24/7 crisis service that operates around the clock so needs constant access to the vehicles. With the mileage that they do and the size of the area they cover, they needed reliable charging infrastructure on site to give them that confidence to go electric.

“It has enabled us to change our policy so that all new vehicles added to the fleet have to be electric unless there is a very good operational reason why they can’t be EVs.”

Scott Duncan, associate consultant at Mer, said: “We are proud to be helping the Trust with the decarbonisation of its fleet. This was a complex but rewarding project to install chargers across multiple locations. The Trust is making full use of the smart charger technology to set different tariffs for various use cases and utilise Mer’s proprietary back-office software for data analytics.”