Commute Zero - A Scoping Review

About the study 

The Department for Transport (DfT) commissioned the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) to carry out research to understand employers’ attitudes towards encouraging their employees to reduce their commuting and business travel emissions, identify facilitators and barriers to employers doing so, and exploring the support employers needed to help employees towards greener travel choices. The research was conducted between November 2022 and January 2023. It involved a literature review and fifteen qualitative interviews with large employers that had already taken up low-carbon travel initiatives for staff, employer membership organisations, and Local Authorities. Findings from this scoping research will inform future research priorities.

Findings

The literature review found that, historically, employers have taken little interest in encouraging employees to reduce their workplace travel emissions unless it contributed to their companies’ profitability. However, recent evidence and trends documented in literature and captured via interviews with employers indicated that business attitudes to workplace travel may have shifted in recent years, with employers taking greater responsibility for their staff’s workplace travel. 

The employer interviews identified a range of barriers to business uptake of workplace travel initiatives, including a lack of knowledge about initiatives, perceived high upfront costs to introduce initiatives, lack of infrastructure, and issues with taxation. It was considered easier for employers and employees to engage with decarbonising workplace travel in regions where public and active travel infrastructure were more developed.

Interviewees’ suggestions for government support for employers revolved around four main themes:

• Clear national policies and guidance to help employers decide how to facilitate more sustainable travel, thereby helping managers obtain the permissions they need to put initiatives in place.
• Better information sharing, advice, and networking between stakeholders. This included supporting initiatives to set up ‘sustainability hubs’ where employers could seek advice on workplace travel planning, effective, sustainable travel initiatives, and sources of funding. There was also a desire from employers to know who they should contact in Local Authorities about improving sustainable travel infrastructure, and for better contact between employers and Local Authorities. 
• Continued investment in local, sustainable travel infrastructure for public transport and active travel while supporting shared or public alternatives to a single use of cars and a faster transition to electric vehicles. For public transport, employers advocated much cheaper fares, and improved frequency, reliability and convenience for buses and trains.
• Funding new initiatives.Having a national strategy for funding initiatives with joined-up thinking across departments and authorities. There was also a call for successful initiatives to be funded for longer, as well as reinvestment of any financial charges and disincentives for travelling by car into sustainable and workplace travel initiatives.

Methodology

There were two main strands of research: 

• Literature review to provide a baseline of the extent of information available.
• Scoping interviews with employers, employer membership organisations, and Local Authority representatives to explore their views on reporting carbon emissions, what initiatives are already in place, and views on the prospective roles these organisations may have in moving towards encouraging sustainable commuting.