Specialist Fleet Services (SFS) has celebrated its 30th anniversary by hosting an award ceremony at Coombe Abbey in Warwickshire.
Staff from the company and its vehicle rental division CTS Hire attended the event.
SFS managing director Bob Sweetland, who has been with the company from the start, received the award for longest serving employee.
He said: “In 1992 I was working in local authority leasing for a bank and was introduced to Serco. They are a big facilities management company and had won a contract with Northampton County Council. I arranged bank funding for the vehicles, which Serco maintained, and the council paid a fixed price. Essentially it was a tripartite contract hire agreement and it worked well, so we set up a joint venture company to offer the same service to other councils.”
Most SFS customers are local authorities. Sweetland added: “We operate 13 workshops spread throughout the country and, of those, nine are local authority workshops, which we now run. In the early days we used to subcontract the maintenance work back to the council, but we find it works much better if we have full control. We can make greater commitments to the authority in terms of investment and service delivery levels.”
Additionally, the company is focused on the decarbonisation of local authority fleets. “The electrification and decarbonisation of fleets is a major area of focus for the future for most councils and we are helping our customers lay the foundations for alternative fuelled fleets,” Sweetland concluded. “As part of this we have installed two electric refuse vehicles at CTS Hire that councils can rent for three months to try out the technology on rounds in their own area and make informed decisions about their refuse collection fleet.”