Royal Mail Group receives 1,200 orders for car salary sacrifice scheme

[TrueBlueTerrier]

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Royal Mail Group has seen staff place 1,200 orders for cars after launching a salary sacrifice car scheme in March.

It launched its My Drive scheme, which employees can take up at any time and is provided by Zenith, in conjunction with the launch of its flexible benefits plan, branded My Bundle.

During the three-week flex election window in March, the organisation received 55,000 hits on its online reward portal, with 3% of employees making a benefits selection.

The scheme is available for all 140,000 permanent Royal Mail Group employees.

The flex scheme includes: dental cover, life assurance for employees and their partners, health cash plans, critical illness cover for employees and partners, personal accident cover, travel insurance, health assessments, discounts on products, childcare vouchers and a bikes-for-work scheme.

In addition, Royal Mail Group has created product bundles as part of its offering. This means that if an employee selects two products featured in a product bundle, they will receive a 10% discount on each, regardless of supplier. The product bundles comprise personal accident and travel insurance, and life assurance and critical illness cover for employees or their partners.


Harry Koumourou, benefits and recognition manager at Royal Mail Group, said: “When we first [started] on this journey, we re-visited what Royal Mail provided. It was a very traditional benefits offering to all employees and it became obvious that [these] weren’t uniformly applied across the business and the choice was quite limited.

“We also wanted to develop something that aligned to and supported our strategic business initiatives, such as our cultural and behavioural agendas and, being a newly privatised company, we wanted to compete on a level playing field with our FTSE 100 peers where the vast majority offered flex, [so in order to] start attracting and retaining talent, we needed to develop our benefits proposition.

“We’re mindful of [making] it a level playing field for everyone. We don’t want to segment what we offer to who.”

[scmtex73]

yea, all very good. My issue at the moment is the effects of the minimum wage increase.
I was all ready to order a car in February and sufficient funds in place. Order was placed then was declined due to the minimum wage increase on the 1st April. This was an event over 6 weeks away from the order. Since then you can only view cars with the minimum wage in place so your figure to spend is a lot lower. Why could the current pay rise not be applied to the my bundle website immediately so you could at least see the cars available to you as they mostly come with a 12 to 16 week lead time therefore the money available will be in place. I know others have been frustrated at this and my personal point is that I have a disabled wife and currently we have no vehicle as she recently lost her motability car after a review of her PIP circumstances. By the time HR and my bundle sort everything out it will be another 4 weeks at least until you can see what you can get with the revised figures. I could not give two hoots about the back pay but surely just the press of a button could of updated the my bundle website with the new pay scale. Its funny how they can penalise you with the minimum wage increase 8 weeks before it happens but can not reward you with the pay increase when its already agreed. I hope that makes sense