What Van? Britain's biggest and best van buyers' guide

“Within that package you get electronic access to Van Excellence, news emails, limited access to the call centre, and when you are ready to go for accreditation we can carry out a remote audit through the fleet management system,”
explains Cartwright, who said the main route to market will be for businesses to encourage its contractors to get involved. Looking at the range of businesses accredited to Van Excellence, Cartwright says they will all have contractors or other people they can influence, from saying it’s something a company would like its contractors to do, through to mandating it for all associated firms.

But why does Van Excellence even exist at all?

Cartwright says the role of Van Excellence is to demonstrate that “as an industry we are entirely capable of a regulatory scheme”, and don’t need anything new.

“I don’t see anything in the code that is unreasonable. It’s all good practice, and around the three areas of the driver, the business and the vehicle,” he continues. “Manufacturers can tell you how car-like the driving experience of their van is, but a badly loaded, badly maintained hi-cube long- wheelbase van goes off being car-like very quickly.”

Training

The FTA also offers training off the back of its code of practice and guide, and operates a Certificate of Excellence in Van Operations, a half-day FTA-branded qualification valid for three years.

“We puffed our chest out [and branded it FTA] rather than it being a City and Guilds or NVQ,” says Cartwright. He adds that the primary market is managers and supervisors with van responsibility, although
the FTA has found a secondary audience in the form of van staff from manufacturers and leasing or rental companies.

The association also offers 10 free-of-charge van fleet management guides for people registering on its website, covering various subjects. Driver training is also on the agenda, with the FTA close to launching a Van Excellence Certificate of Driver Competence.

“A number of people want to upskill drivers and recognise that qualification. We’ve got some pretty chunky interest in this,” Cartwright says.

He also argues that Van Excellence members should see a better residual value return on their vehicles.

“A BT van will, for example, get a great return because it’s been well specced and well maintained, and it’s spent most of its life parked by the side
of the road,” he says. “Van Excellence vans should get a better value because they are doing all the things that shouldmake for a good residual value.” In addition Cartwright wants to see more attention on the van market from enforcement.

“Vans seem to have a charmed life with roadside enforcement,” he continues. “We know there’s a problem because there’s a 50% MoT failure rate [with vans], so people are treating vans like cars and chucking them into the MoT to see what they fail on – that’s not acting like professional drivers.”

The FTA would like to see greater visibility from the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency in enforcing standards.

“The majority of truck operators are habitually compliant and I’d say Van Excellence operators are, but that still leaves a lot of vans.”

Making amends

The FTA made only its second amendment to the code of practice standards recently, and both have been around the topic of speed.

The governance group that FTA van boss Mark Cartwright describes as “my conscience” is made up of operator members, and they have to agree any changes. “We can’t change the code without going through them,” he says. “They own Van Excellence so when we say it’s by the industry for the industry, it’s not just a line.” The first change concerned an exception to the mandatory fitment of a 70mph speed limiter. “We forgot about ambulances, so now there’s a concession for anything with a blue light on top,” explains Cartwright. The second change sees an alternative to the mandatory speed limiter. “We recognized that there are other ways of managing speed, rather than limiting to 70, which has the appeal of being easy,” he says. “We recognize robustly policed and managed telematics speed management programmes as being accredited, but the key is that we need to see them robustly policed.”

That, explains the FTA’s van man, allows “contextual speeding” to come into play, rather than a 70mph speed limiter that doesn’t have an effect on speeding in places where the limit is under 70.

Speed limiters are something Cartwright is keen to push further, and has issued a challenges to manufacturers, rental and leasing companies to see if one will be the first to limit its vans to 70mph by default, and make operators ask to have the limit removed. “What other piece of industrial equipment would allow you to break the law?” he questions. “We’re close to getting one rental company but the marketing people are worried it will put people off.”

The importance of the van market