Motor Transport Fleet 200

Fleet 200 Home | Total Vehicles | By Hire and Reward | By Own Account

Welcome to the Motor Transport Fleet 200, the definitive guide to commercial vehicle fleet assets in operation in the UK today.

The data presented below is a snapshot in time: fleet assets can move up and down within the margin prescribed on the O-licence. The difference between the number of vehicles authorised on an O-licence and the number of vehicles specified on an O-licence fluctuates depending on the time of year and peaks in demand.

According to data from the Office of the Traffic Commissioners, there are 371,718 vehicles specified on some 67,122 O-licences in circulation in the UK (excluding Northern Ireland, as there is no equivalent data set published by the Department for Infrastructure), as of October 2017.

The Fleet 200

Motor Transport Fleet 200 Averages

The Motor Transport Fleet 200 actually accounts for 246 individual O-licences. O-licences have been merged where appropriate – such as DHL (which actually comprises of DHL Supply Chain; UK Mail; Tradeteam; DHL International (UK) – which trades as DHL Express – and Exel UK). Together, the 246 O-licences on this list account for just 0.36% of all in circulation – but the 200 businesses account for 100,191 vehicles specified to those O-licences – 27% of the total number of vehicles specified on O-licences in the UK.

The largest operator of truck assets in the UK - DHL (as constituted above)and its 7,117 specified assets - accounts for 1.9% of all vehicles specified in the UK.

There are ten businesses with fleets in excess of 2,000 vehicles (primarily as a result of the FedEx/ TNT integration), and a further nine with fleets in excess of 1,000 vehicles. That mans that 19 operators, out of 67,118 account for 12% of all HGVs in the UK registered for use (some 44,621 vehicles).

Splitting the industry between ‘Hire and Reward’ and ‘Own-Account’ becomes a little more complicated, as the traditional demarcation between Standard National and Standard International O-licence holders and Restricted O-licence holders has become blurred.

Motortransport.co.uk has split the data set using some creative licence: the largest hire and reward operator in DHL is clearly a third-party logistics firm in every sense of the term, where as a business like Veolia, our leading Own-Account operator, runs a combination of outsourced refuse collection services as well as third-party logistics in areas such as Hazardous Waste disposal and shipping meaning that the difference is a little less black and white.

Hire and reward operators account for 50.3% of all vehicles specified on O-licences, run by 39.5% of all businesses in the Fleet 200; while 49.7% of all vehicles are run by own-account operators – which account for 60.5% of businesses in the Fleet 200.

Hire and Reward

The largest Hire and Reward operators incorporate six businesses with fleets in excess of 2,000 vehicles (DHL; Royal Mail; Wincanton; XPO Logistics; FedEx/ TNT Express and UPS), and 12 in excess of 1,000 vehicles (adding Eddie Stobart; Turners (Soham); Kuehne + Nagel; DPDgroup; Gist and Maritime).

The smallest hire and reward operator in the Fleet 200 is the joint 199^th ranked Pollock (Scotrans) with 137 vehicles specified to its O-licences.

Own-Account

The 50 largest Own-Account operators in the UK includes three businesses with a fleet in excess of 2,000 vehicles (Veolia; Biffa Waste Services; Tesco Distribution/ Booker Wholesale and Travis Perkins) and a further three with fleet assets in excess of 1,000 vehicles (Brake Bros; Saint-Gobain/ Jewson and Bidfood, formerly 3663).

The smallest own-account operator in the Fleet 200 is the joint 199^th ranked Clancy Docwra with 137 vehicles specified to its O-licences.