24
Examination of witnesses
Oz Choudhri and Laura Holloway.
Q54 The Chair: Welcome to the House of Lords Built Environment Committee’s public evidence session in our inquiry into public transport in towns and cities. This inquiry, among other things, is considering the impact of technological and digital developments on travel behaviours, future trends in public transport innovation, and how public policy might be shaped in the light of those trends. We are very interested in connectivity across modes and better integration through data and innovation. We will be making recommendations to the Government later this year.
This session is focusing on innovation, and our witnesses today are Oz Choudhri, who is head of mobility solutions UK and Ireland for Enterprise Holdings, and Laura Holloway, head of government and public affairs UK and Ireland at Enterprise Holdings. You are most welcome. The session is being broadcast on parliamentlive.tv. A full transcript is also being taken and it will be available to you afterwards to make any corrections. I would be grateful if members and witnesses could keep their questions and responses brief so that we can cover a good deal of ground this morning.
I will start with a general question. How can better integration and better connectivity across public transport modes be delivered in urban areas? Perhaps you could focus outside London, because there is a model in London and other areas, I think, are more problematic.
Oz Choudhri: From our experience, there is a real role for the local authorities and the transport authorities to play. That role is to help start the innovation and deliver some of these project trials to start to see better connectivity and integration in different modes of transport. What we have to realise is that when we look at some of the local authorities and the transport authorities, because this is such a new sector in the way that it is looking to integrate and better connect public transport with new modes of transportation, we need to see a bit more expertise or knowledge in the local authorities, allowing them to better understand how to best deliver some of these projects.
There is definitely a need for more best practice to be shared between local authorities, but this is also where the private sector can help, particularly transport operators that have previous experience in delivering better connectivity among transportation. Again, I hope that we can start to see more local authorities, which are definitely engaging with the private sector, having more engagement and more conversations with the private sector about their experiences, and inviting the private sector to come in and run trials or projects that will give both parties a good understanding of how to better connect transportation and maybe see some behavioural change, which is what this is really about. That was the first point I would like to make about what we are seeing right now in the local authorities.
It is also important to understand that the Department for Transport has done a fantastic job in creating specific funding that will allow many transport authorities and local authorities to start to launch projects that better connect transport. That is limited in the sense that it probably affects some areas in the UK, but obviously there are a number of local authorities that would also like to introduce better connectivity among their existing transportation and their new public transportation. It is about how they initially apply for potential funding to help them see, innovate and develop these projects. If they are able to access funding, can that funding be appropriately applied to these projects, which are not necessarily about capital infrastructure but are sometimes about digital transformation or digital development?
We often see historical funding as more about capital investment as opposed to maybe revenue. In some projects that require digital development and require operators to collaborate and integrate better, some local authorities would probably want some more guidance and maybe more direction about how best to use some of that funding. Again, to reiterate my first point, that is where the private sector would also like to help: by giving their expertise on the art of the possible, on delivery of projects, and in working in partnership with the local authorities and the transport authorities.
Local authorities play a crucial role there in that they are what I would call the gatekeeper. They allow us as operators to collaborate and bring better connectivity. The local authority makes sure that there is a vision for how we connect and make the consumer more aware of their choices when it comes to more sustainable transport and better connected transport.
The local authority is also key to ensuring that the policy and the objectives are achieved. A lot of the local authorities that we engage with will have a vision for decarbonising the region, calming traffic, bringing more footfall back to some of the high streets through better access to transportation, and it is a strong vision. It is a great vision and it is one that we as operators fully support. I think it is the role of the local authority to share best practice and to set the vision but, more importantly, to create an environment where the commercial operators can collaborate.
The Chair: Local authorities and funding are key. Laura, it would be good to understand what Enterprise Holdings is doing. I think it is a car sharing model. Could you talk a little about that and where you operate?
Laura Holloway: Yes. Most people only ever encounter us when they are maybe looking to hire a car for their holidays or they are at the airport or something, but that is quite a small part of our business. We are an operator with around 500 locations across the UK, and we have everything from a hatchback all the way to a refrigerated truck, but we also have various ways of accessing. You can have the standard rental model whereby you come to one of our locations, but, as you mentioned, we also have the car sharing or car club model, which is rental from anything from half an hour to a full day, and instant access with an app or a credit card. You can use that as and when you need it. That is our on-demand model.
We work with a lot of other operators, so we act as the central collaborator on active travel and public transport, and we are involved in mobility as a service. We have a platform that we use and an active product up in Scotland called GO-HI. Oz is probably more able to discuss it, but it is one of the UK’s first mobility as a service products in a large rural area.
We have an interesting and diverse view as an operator, because we work directly with and for local authorities as customers but also as people who offer services to consumers in their areas. Effectively, we deal in vehicles, cars, vans and so on, and we find that having access to vehicles in a lot of situations—not having the car all the time, but it being available when you need it—allows people to open their minds to other forms of transport. If you can use a car when you need it, and we all know there are times when nothing other than a car will do the journey for you, that can link you to other modes. It can bring in active travel, because you can cycle for the journeys you can cycle, but you can then use the car club if you need to pick up the children or do a big shop or you have an elderly or disabled person with you. It provides that flexibility.
One of the main things for us is that element of connectivity and integration between modes. It has to be multimodal so that it gives consumers, customers and businesses choice and they can use the right mode for the right journey, rather than us prescribing what we think a person should be using. That is how you will achieve that behavioural change: by giving consumers choice. We have always emphasised as a business that we do not have all the answers and all the solutions, but we want to work in partnership with local authorities and other providers so that we can bring forward those solutions.
Q55 Lord Stunell: Mr Choudhri, you talked about behaviour change. Where do your customers come from? Are they primarily business or leisure, or commercial or industrial? For that matter, which part of the country are they in? Are they rural, urban and so on? Are you creating a new market? Are you taking people off trains or off roads and buses? Can you give us some idea of where you are coming from and where you hope to go to with Enterprise?
Oz Choudhri: We cover very broad demographic as Enterprise. We have an infrastructure that covers the whole of the UK and Ireland. We see our consumer base as the leisure or the retail consumer and businesses. We also see it as tourists. Obviously, we operate at most, if not all, of the major airports. A lot of our products are for when people are renting a car—so ad hoc needs for both personal use and business travel—but our car club right now has over 2,500 car club vehicles in about 180 towns and cities across the UK. We do not have full coverage, but it is the largest car club in the UK.
We often see the user of a car club wearing many hats, so to speak. They could be using it for personal reasons. Maybe they do not own a car or they have access to only one vehicle. We see a lot of businesses using the car club for staff travel. Rather than having staff parking the car at their offices, it is much easier to access these vehicles on demand. I mentioned tourists. We do not just focus on the London urban areas. We have made a real point to grow our network on the vehicle hire and car club perspective across the UK, so we cover the suburban and the rural areas as well.
On your point about whether we are creating a market, we have often seen real demand in the suburban and rural areas, particularly with something like the Enterprise car club, because there may be a lack of existing public transport infrastructure there. They still have a need and a demand to travel. We also find in the suburban and rural areas that sharing is in the psyche; they are used to sharing. When you do not have a lot, you are forced to share anyway. They are used to the concept of accessing a pay-as-you-go car club or on-demand vehicle hire.
We have a very broad demographic and we are constantly growing that marketplace. We are also seeing that the consumer is very keen to access multimodal transport. If they do not own a vehicle and use the Enterprise car club, for example, they would also like to access micro-mobility, bike hire or active travel, because it fits well with the concept of being less dependent on vehicle ownership and, more importantly, using different modes of transport.
Lord Stunell: You have talked about your app and its application across modes. How do you use that? If you are in a car club and you want to hire a bike or to know the best way to get to Edinburgh, does your app provide that information?
Oz Choudhri: It does. We are part of a project called GO-HI, as Laura said, which is led by HITRANS, which is one of the regional transport partners. It manages and does all the planning in the Highlands and Islands. We worked in partnership with it and applied to the Scottish Government for some of their investment fund for mobility as a service. We deployed and launched a MaaS platform, but the main objective was to give the residents, businesses and tourists access to multimodal travel and sustainable transport.
We have launched that platform and have had to integrate all the modes of transport through technology, so that when the consumer is on the app or a desktop—it is not exclusive to a smartphone—they can plan a journey. They can say, “I’m in location A and I would like to get to B. Show me the different modes that are available to me right now”. It also gives them good content and says whether the buses are available and running on time. We can even tell you if they are delayed, and the same with the trains. It also brings in some of the newer modes of transport such as your bike hires, your car clubs and good old-fashioned walking and says, “These are also relevant and available to you”. It maps it out, gives you an itinerary, and goes one step further and allows you to book and pay. We are seeing that the consumer, when they are looking to change their behaviour, wants everything to be fairly easy, intuitive, on demand and instant when they are looking to access transportation.
We are excited about that project. It was launched in the Highlands and Islands—travelling there is definitely an experience—but I used the app this morning to get here. I booked my train journey and it told me my route here. I walked from my home to the train station, got the train and then walked here. Although it is configured for the Highlands and Islands, I was cheating a little bit and used it this morning. That is the point, I suppose. It is really effective in that sense.
The Chair: It is a bit like Citymapper, which we use if we are London-based. You can book and pay with GO-HI, which you cannot do with Citymapper, but it is a similar kind of app, presumably.
Oz Choudhri: Yes, it is exactly that. You can plan, book and pay. One challenge that you have to overcome is getting operator modes to integrate.
The Chair: Presumably this throws up quite a lot of data, which is useful both to the consumer—you gave us that example today—and potentially to us. Do you get some data about how modes are shifting that you are able to make available to the committee?
Oz Choudhri: There is definitely data that we will generate. It is a live programme now. We are fortunate. The University of Leeds is part of evaluating the GO-HI project, and I am sure it will be able to provide some data at some point. When anyone joins the project platform, we ask them about their historical travel behaviour, which gives us a benchmark to evaluate how they adopt and use different modes of transportation.
To your question, yes, data will definitely be generated. Part of our commitment when we applied for funding was that credible data would come from this that could be shared with all the transport authorities and potentially with any local authority that would like to access it, which is why the University of Leeds plays a key role there for us.
The Chair: The sooner the better, from our point of view, because our study is current. If there is data, it would add a lot of value to us, because it is interesting. You are very much on this business of how people move from one mode to another.
Q56 Baroness Cohen of Pimlico: This is a slightly tangential question. I can understand the car club arrangement, because fundamentally it works and it gets people to work. We started out thinking about how people get to work. I can see how car clubs work. What is the split? How many of your passenger journeys are car clubs taking people to work or the ancillaries that mean that they can take home the office car? That bit of the business I understand, but I would quite like to get a grip on the bit that I do not.
Oz Choudhri: We have approximately 175,000 car club members in the UK. From the last data we looked at, probably 60% of those members use it for personal reasons and leisure, and 40% use it for business or what you might deem staff travel. Particularly with the Enterprise car club, a lot of those members might represent the small and medium-sized enterprises in a region, and having good access to a car club allows them to conduct staff travel, business meetings and so on.
Baroness Cohen of Pimlico: That is not an answer that I expected, so I am glad to have elicited it. We in my family have just abandoned a car rental in Scotland, because you arrive at Inverness Airport and they try to give you a car that you have not ordered and do not want, but, of course, if you wait a couple of hours, you can have the one you ordered. We will never do that again. We will drive to the place. Are you any good at that bit of the business? If one arrives at an airport in the Highlands, like Inverness, how are you working? I happen not to have used Enterprise, but it is important to know how that bit works.
Oz Choudhri: Yes. We are very good at that engagement. We have been doing it for over 25 years now in the UK and Scotland. We have focused on the engagement with our consumers, so we have always made sure that it is easy. Communication is strong. The way you may want to book or interact with us is flexible but also intuitive. We have thousands of customers. We refer to them as repeat customers, because they come back because they judge us based on our service. That is one of the main criteria. Yes, we believe that we provide a good service.
You make a strong point that someone’s experience of personal use sometimes dictates their decisions about using these modes of transport outside personal use. Would they use it for work? We often see that our consumer may at one point of the day be a retail customer using it for personal use, and then may wear a different hat for staff travel. We are attuned and have to be very aware of that.
Laura Holloway: Briefly, that was a point I made earlier about the right mode for the right journey, and the right experience for the right customer. You might want a specific vehicle, and you want to pick it up at that location and know that it will be there, whereas another customer might want the car brought to them, might want to access it when they need it, and does not need or want that specific service.
Sometimes it is about understanding what a consumer wants from a journey rather than assuming or prescribing it. Some of what we do is trying to understand our customers, how they want to use travel and how they want to move. If you do not have that bad experience, you will not say, "I’m not doing that again, because it was really bad last time”. Sometimes those bad experiences, as Oz said, put you off using it in other ways, but also put you off trying other innovations because you think, "I won’t bother. I’ll use my private vehicle”. That consumer experience is important as well.
Q57 Lord Moylan: Thank you very much. Mr Choudhri, in your opening remarks you mentioned the words "local authorities" about three dozen times and "transport authorities" half a dozen times. I used to hold an elected position in a local authority in London until recently, in which I was responsible for dealing with car club applicants. I was sympathetic to establishing a car club. The first thing you wanted was dedicated parking space, which is at a premium in Kensington and Chelsea, but we found the space for you. But I was clear that we would not provide a subsidy and we would not grant a monopoly. There would be at least two—in fact, originally there were three—competing car clubs in Kensington and Chelsea, partly on the grounds that if you could not make a car club a viable commercial proposition without subsidy in Kensington and Chelsea, the model was doomed because of the density of the population and the relatively low car ownership. If you could not make it work there, it would never work anywhere else. It did work and there are now two car clubs. Yours is one of them, and that is absolutely fine.
What do you want from local authorities, which you mention so often? If I can supply some of the answers, you can tell me which of them are still relevant and then add more if you want, because this will be important for what we write.
The first is dedicated road space for your vehicle, so that nobody else can park in that space. Do you require some sort of operating subsidy—outside Kensington and Chelsea, outside London—or do you require some capital investment from the local authority other than the painted lines and signs that would have to be done by the local authority to make that space legally yours? Do you require exclusivity in a particular local authority area? I know that at least one car club walked away when we said that we would not grant exclusive access or a monopoly. The other three were good, but one walked away and said, "That’s not part of our model”.
Next—I offer this up to you as something that you might want to ask for, and I bet you will—in London I believe it is still difficult to take a car from one borough to another. You can take it, but you cannot park it. You can drive wherever you want, but there is no interoperability between the boroughs and even, in some cases, within boroughs. Your model is such that once I take the car from the space outside my front door, I have to bring it back to the space outside my front door. I cannot park it even in one of your spaces elsewhere in the borough, or stop it or drop it.
What do you want public authorities to do? Give us a shopping list and we can consider it.
Laura Holloway: It is interesting. It depends on what the car club does and what kind of car club it is. We operate different ones. The version in Kensington and Chelsea that you mentioned is a traditional on-street car club and, as you say, it requires a designated space. Yes, we operate normally on a return-to-base model. One reason is that car clubs should not compete against or replace public transport. They should operate for journeys where you cannot take public transport. If you have a car club that is not on a back-to-base model, people can take it and drop it somewhere completely different. That is not a consistent location for whoever wants to access it. It is a journey which, in a lot of cases, you could probably use a one-way public transport system for that is already running. They are supposed to be journeys that you cannot do on that. That is the first thing.
Also, probably in a lot of cases, a lot of the car clubs that do that put the vehicle back in its original space at the end of the day.
Lord Moylan: Like Boris bikes.
Laura Holloway: That is not a greatly efficient use of that vehicle. Secondly, we offer different kinds of car clubs. A lot of our car clubs are based at our own branch locations, because we have such a huge network across the UK. We use a direct-access car club 24/7 from our branch locations. They are parked on our property or our leasehold property, so we do not require that kind of intervention from the council, albeit that we often want the endorsement and the involvement of the council to design where the vehicles are. In that sense, we control where those ones are; we can move them around and we can add more as necessary. It is a much more flexible process, so we do that.
The first thing we want from local authorities—Oz mentioned it earlier—is collaboration at an early stage. If a council wants to launch a car club and to add those modes for people to use, it should work with the private sector at an early stage to design the scheme. Often a local authority will say, "We want 50 cars and we want all of them to be electric”. You mentioned capital investment. Getting the charging infrastructure in for electric vehicles is a lot more complex and costly. That is where some of the capital investment potentially needs to come, because you need to decide who will own that infrastructure. Is it the car club, in which case there is some complexity in the legal arrangement? Who will maintain that infrastructure on an ongoing basis? Who will make sure that it is working and that people have plugged it in properly—all those things with electric car clubs? That is where the local authority investment sometimes needs to get involved.
When you design a scheme, at the moment a wholly electric car club might not be what you want as a local authority. You might want a mixture of cars and vans. You might want to add some vehicles and work out where there is additional demand or where people have been looking for vehicles. Add some more and gradually build it up, rather than starting from 50 cars and then realising that they are all in the wrong places and you have to go back and repeat it.
Collaborate with us. We want the local authorities to be in control of the transport options in their areas so they can be part of the policy goals in the strategy, but if you are not working with us to design those schemes, we might know things from our experience and our customer base and can help to inform about how could that look and what the strategy should be. If it is almost set and you backfill through procurement, you will not have that strategic involvement and will probably not make the most of what the operators could offer.
Also, we operate in a lot of cases where we are not the only or main provider. We do not necessarily need to be. Our service is flexible. We use our locations. They are for businesses. We may be the main procured provider. We are perfectly happy to work in all those different environments, because we see it as a partnership with the local authority. We are happy to be guided on what is needed as well.
Lord Moylan: There must be a level of population density where the scheme is inoperable without subsidy. Kensington and Chelsea, as I said, is highly dense and has low levels relative to many parts. It used to be said that if you looked at the car ownership details of Kensington and Chelsea, you would think that you were in a poor country. It is a ripe market for you. Even when you get into the suburbs, the difficulty of having an on-street car club must become greater, and then there are rural parts of the country or smaller towns. From your experience, what density allows you to operate commercially, and when do you start to need subsidy?
Oz Choudhri: I have maybe a couple of examples that will help to answer those questions. We have been involved in the Coventry mobility credit scheme. Coventry council engages with Enterprise and other transportation providers to deploy a car club in Coventry, and the subsidy comes from Transport for West Midlands and Coventry council. Residents were asked to give up their old diesel vehicles and were given a £3,000 allowance that could be spent on different modes of transport—public transport, micromobility and car clubs.
Interestingly, Coventry itself was not necessarily an area where we had launched our car club services. We had not seen a demand for them. But we were incentivised to launch—with something like 10 to 12 car club vehicles in and around Coventry—because we knew that there was support from the local authority, which was playing a progressive role there in incentivising behavioural change.
Excitingly, with that project, we were able to launch some of those car clubs and the other modes of transport—bike hire, public transport and so on—at the University of Warwick, which is also based in Coventry. The university is an employer and has its own real estate, and its students created an additional demand for the services. That programme has evolved. Historically, we probably would not have considered Coventry, but now it is a market where we can see a demand for our services.
Lord Moylan: Is it running subsidy-free?
Oz Choudhri: It is, yes, in the sense that the funding from the transport authority—in this case, TFWM—is going to the residents or the consumers in order to access transport through the mobility credit scheme. A couple of our car club vehicles paid for by the university, because it uses them exclusively for staff travel. It makes financial sense to do so, because there is a significant amount of staff travel in and around the area.
The project in Scotland, being in the Highlands and Islands, again had some very rural locations. Part of the funding application there was for some sort of subsidy to launch car club services, again in areas where there was no established market or predisposed consumers for those services. But as we have launched the mobility-as-a-service platform, which has different modes of transport integrated, there is more emphasis on demand and marketing to the consumer that they have these services. Again, we are waiting to build up demand and critical mass for that, but the funding has seeded that and allowed that to happen.
I hope that answers your questions about how we position these offerings.
Lord Moylan: It does. I will not pursue it now, but I am not getting a feel for how financially and commercially sustainable the model is in places that are different from inner west London, where I know it is financially and commercially sustainable, or how far you can go before you start to say, "On our own, we can’t provide a service to these parts of the country or this urban typology or rural typology”. I am trying to get a feel for that, but we will come back to it, no doubt.
The Chair: We can perhaps follow up with questions, because it is important. How big a part of the country can be covered without subsidy when we look at alternative transport options?
Oz Choudhri: It is a great question, because, going back to Lord Moylan’s wish list, we see a lot of local authorities that are progressive and that lead the way. They are also big employers and have staff who currently need to travel. They are starting to see their own staff adopt these services.
In the Highlands and Islands, phase two is for the Highland Council to adopt these multimodal services for its own staff travel. That can make some of these programmes more commercially viable, because there is a demand for the services. They will probably save some of these local authorities money, because they might historically have been reimbursing staff per mile for using their own vehicles. Some of these vehicles could be up to 10 years old, so they are polluting. Again, there are real savings there. As something to point out, that is where we see this growing commercially outside London.
Laura Holloway: That is one of the things we look at in a lot of areas. To your point, if we are to launch a car club in an area where we do not currently have a captive demand or a big call for it, we can look at the major employers. Is it the NHS trust? Is it the local authority? If we can bring in staff travel and that captive demand that is absolutely there, it can make a service commercially viable. Those cars might be dedicated to a certain business from 9 to 5, but in the evenings and at weekends be available for public use. That means that those assets are commercially viable for us to run without subsidy, because they can be used for the staff travel in the day an awful lot. It also means that those assets are used more often, you do not need as many vehicles, and they have a dual purpose.
One problem that we sometimes run into, and have been thinking about for a while and have talked to the Government about, is that some of the taxation regimes in this country, such as benefit-in-kind tax, do not incentivise the kind of dual-asset scheme whereby a car used for staff travel during the day can be used in the evenings potentially by the same employees but paid for as their own personal travel. We have had some issues with benefit-in-kind tax implications. Those people are subject to taxation even if they access those vehicles only in their personal time in the evenings, because they are located at their place of work. A lack of flexibility in our tax regime sometimes prohibits that, but not always. Some schemes work, but we have to think about how we launch them. We have used that concept of using corporate and public-sector demand to make assets viable a lot across the country.
Q58 Lord Grocott: You have touched on a number of the things that I want to ask, but let me try to focus it. As you know, our inquiry is basically about urban transport, principally but not exclusively commuting, people getting to work and back, and the various modes and interactions between modes that that involves.
Car sharing and car rental and your related activities are nothing new. That is not a criticism. I make an observation there. I would like to get some sort of picture from you about how significant your activities are as a solution to the problems of urban transport. How big a part of the system is car sharing and car rental in terms of getting millions of people to work and back each day in our towns and cities? Perhaps more specifically, how has that grown or diminished? Should we focus on that, or is it peripheral and not changing very much and therefore will not be a major part of the solution? How are things going, basically?
Oz Choudhri: The car club for us as a model is growing significantly. The membership is growing. Our coverage across the UK is absolutely growing.
To your point, we are not just looking in the urban areas. We are looking at the suburban and rural areas as well. It is growing, because there is definitely a demand. As more and more local authorities and transport authorities look to launch clean air zones or to bring in restrictions on the types of vehicles, you are faced with a choice where, in many instances outside urban areas, there is a great lack of access to transportation, so if you do not use your vehicle you have limited choices. We see a real growth in demand for our services where we are asked to place vehicles appropriate to where people live or potentially to where they work. They are combining the two as well. That has been one of our strongest growth areas over the last five years.
You are right to point out that this is not new. Car clubs have existed for over 15 years in the UK. We have seen a real growth in demand for those services. There is also real demand for those car club services to interact with other modes of transport. We see that a lot of people who historically may have used their own personal vehicle for commuting are being challenged by the fact that it is single occupancy and just them driving on their own. A stat from the DfT before Covid was that there were 38 million unoccupied seats every morning as people commuted in their vehicles. How do we get those people to change their behaviour and start adopting car clubs and bike hire? We know that when they are commuting, at the start and the end of their commute there are options. They may be not aware of them. We see ourselves playing a significant role in that awareness campaign but, more importantly, we also see ourselves expanding our services and our assets to compensate and to give people more choice so that they can give up driving all the time and use some of these services.
Car club is a growth area for us, but so is vehicle hire. We have been actively growing our vehicle hire services across the UK. We have just under 500 bricks-and-mortar locations across the UK, so our real estate is vast and, again, that real estate plays a pivotal role in allowing us to deploy our services.
I would also point out that we work with other operators. In Russell Square, we have a trial involving Brompton Bike Hire at one of our Enterprise locations, because we know that consumers there are asking for more access to multimodal travel. It is low-tech. We have physically launched some Brompton bikes, and when someone comes in they can rent a Brompton as well as rent a car club or hire a vehicle.
We will play a significant role, because we will be needed to help people to transition from vehicle ownership to still having access to vehicles but with a pay-as-you-go or a shared concept. More importantly, we are also good at promoting other modes of transport. Historically, you would not rent a car by driving your car to an Enterprise location and dropping it there. You would typically use a bus, a train or some form of public transport to get to one of our locations if required. We have always collaborated well with public transport, but now is the time, through legislation, through clean air zones and through the drive to electric vehicles, to see people change their behaviour and adopt some of these modes of transport.
I hope that has answered your question. It is definitely a growth area for us and we will play a key role.
Lord Grocott: That was helpful. Thank you. But it would be nice to know something measurable. You made the point, which is common sense and which everyone can relate to, about having X journeys that are one person in a vehicle. You have been around for a long time. Do you have any stats to show that, in areas where you function, something measurable in the number of single-occupant cars has diminished as a result of your activities? Are there any stats in that field?
Oz Choudhri: There are, and we will happily provide them. Enterprise Car Club is part of CoMoUK, our trade body, which looks at a lot of data, runs annual surveys and publishes them. The most recent survey on all car clubs across the UK, not specific to Enterprise, showed that every car club deployed would displace up to 18.5 vehicles off the road.
Again, I am more than happy after this session to provide some of the stats and the data on challenging single occupancy and how it is displacing some of that bad behaviour in the way people use cars. It goes back over a number of years, so it is well documented.
The Chair: Are people prepared to walk to the car club, and how far? You have suggested that they take the train or the bus.
Oz Choudhri: People will walk to a car club, but they tend to look at how close they are, and that is what we have to show them on our apps. We will have to come back to you to let you know whether there is a threshold above which someone would not walk. I suspect that a quarter of a mile is the type of threshold.
Laura Holloway: It also depends on the type of customer we are talking about. Customers in the urban centres—we have a lot of car clubs up in Manchester, for example—and in the city centres are generally a bit more willing to cycle or walk a bit further. But if you are out in a rural area or a suburb, you will probably not want to travel to the next village or the next area to find a car club. I suspect that how far you will go depends on what type of customer you are, where you go and where you have come from, effectively. I am sure we can write to you afterwards and provide some information.
The Chair: Another thing is the cost of that versus public transport. People make a choice. Does the fact that you have grown strongly, perhaps because of Covid, suggest that you are quite reasonable value?
Oz Choudhri: Yes.
Laura Holloway: You would probably expect a car club to cost more than public transport, and that is how it should be. Public transport should be a low-cost option for people to use, so you would anticipate that a car club should not compete in price with public transport. That is not the aim. We do not see ourselves as a competitor. We see ourselves as complementary. We can link to public transport. We do not price ourselves to compete. We price ourselves based on the usage, the cost of the vehicle, the insurance and all the other elements. Other elements are built into car clubs, like the mileage you will use. Certain miles are included, but if you go over that it is additional.
Lord Moylan: When I gave up my car for three years, I joined a car club—Enterprise, in fact, in Kensington—and I regarded it principally as back-up rather than as a primary mode. I can well understand and am familiar with the 18 cars coming off the road for each one. I find that intuitively quite plausible. In terms of money, most of the time I would go for public transport, but if I used the car club, I was not comparing it with public transport. I was comparing in my head to some idea of the total cost of owning a car as opposed to the total cost of being a member of a car club, which was much smaller because I did not use it that often. That was the balance.
The Chair: Yes. There is lots of nodding.
Q59 Lord Berkeley: I am interested in the issues. You have talked about 18.5 vehicles coming off the road. That presumably relates to the space that the vehicles take up when they are not being used and are parked somewhere, but you would not get 18.5 people in one car club thing. That is to do with the space required in a city with fewer cars parked, which is clearly desirable. It does not say much about the reduced congestion on the road because the cars are still being used, which is a personal form of transport. In some cities, people do not want so much congestion on the road because it affects the buses, the pedestrians, the cyclists or whatever. That statistic is separate from whether it reduces congestion or not. Then, the issue of safety probably does not come particularly into this argument. The fewer cars there are, probably the safer it is for pedestrians, cyclists and anyone else.
I am particularly interested in your comment about interaction with other modes. You said that there is a Brompton Bike Hire place in Russell Square. I have a Brompton downstairs. How many people actually live in Russell Square and might want to hire a Brompton? It seems to be a funny place to put it. I would put it next to a railway station or a bus station. It is on the 267 bus route and there is a tube station, which is one of the most congested in London, full of tourists going to the British Museum. Maybe that is a reason for having it.
In terms of the intersection and interaction with other modes, you mentioned bicycles for hire, and scooters, which will soon be for hire. With Uber, you can reserve the whole route to make sure that when you get to the bicycle it will be there and it is yours. If you are to have several different forms of transport in this chain, which sounds a wonderful idea, can you reserve them so that you have 100% certainty that you will get to the other end?
Laura Holloway: Can I answer your point about the 18.5 vehicles first? Our point is that it takes 18.5 vehicles off the road to the extent that those vehicles are not being used by people, so in that way it reduces congestion. We find that when people own a private vehicle they tend to use it for a lot of journeys because they own it, they have paid for it, they pay for the insurance and it is a cost to them. It sits outside on their driveway or on the street, so they can come out and go in the car because it is easier. The point about taking 18.5 vehicles off the road is that it reduces congestion because those vehicles are not being driven into a city centre.
Also, our entire fleet is compliant with the clean air zone minimum targets. The emissions from our fleet are completely compliant with clean air zones. Any car club or rental vehicle from us is exempt from all charges, not the congestion charge in central London but the ULEZ for example, and other clean air zones outside London.
To your point, you cannot get 18.5 people in one car club, but those 18.5 people probably use other modes of transport or, if they use a car club, it is occasionally, going to the point that Lord Moylan made earlier.
Lord Berkeley: It is also about leaving the cars that are not being used on the road, which some people say is a public space and that they should not be left there. It would be nice to have some statistics to justify what you have said.
Laura Holloway: Yes. The survey that we referenced looked at it on the basis of a lot of people deciding not to own a vehicle or maybe not to own a second vehicle, which is the other element to it. You would not have that vehicle or that second vehicle or, in some cases, you simply would not use it as much. Yes, they still would remain on the street, but, in a lot of cases, the idea is that people would not own that vehicle or would not own that second vehicle because they have another choice.
Oz Choudhri: The Brompton bikes you referred to came about because we partnered with Brompton Bike Hire at Imperial College London during Covid on a short pilot trial for about six months to see how staff would react to access to Brompton Bike Hire. We gave them a car club onsite. One was a hydrogen vehicle and one was an electric vehicle. We deliberately ran this trial to see how staff who historically would have commuted—many of them were driving vehicles into the university—would react to these new modes of transport. Imperial was evaluating the data and we had different elements to challenge behaviour.
As a result of that project—Imperial has published some data on it, and after this session we will pass that on to you—we decided to run a trial with Brompton. We chose Russell Square because Brompton already had a good network for bikes in that area. Also, it was launched with little integration required. In fact, we physically placed the bikes in one of our locations and trained our staff to ensure that there was a good handover to the consumer. Through unaided marketing, Brompton is telling us that there has been good adoption and good utilisation. We are learning from that.
Your intersection point is a valid one. Because of our growing relationship with Brompton now, we may look at other areas in the UK. Train stations are a great example and a great area where we would look. We are more than happy to share some of that data as we evolve that programme and to keep you updated, but we want to be progressive and take advantage of a good partnership with Brompton.
Lord Berkeley: You are absolutely right, and that is good to hear, but the key is certainty: that if you want to book something, it is there and it works. It is there for you. I hope we can have some evidence on that, too.
Oz Choudhri: You are absolutely right. The project that I mentioned in Scotland uses a MaaS platform—our partner there is a company called Mobilleo—so when you deploy a MaaS platform you have to integrate the back offices of different operators.
In this instance, Enterprise has integrated its car club services, so that when the consumer is looking at this app and would like to plan, book and pay for their journey, a lot of the content and information that they are seeing is in real time because of the way we have integrated it. That somewhat overcomes the challenge of, "I’m about to book a car club. Is it available?" It shows in real time that the car is available, or that it is not available but the time when it will be available.
Again, that is an area for all operators. Our point at the beginning of this was that collaboration plays a big role in getting operators to work better together to provide that integration so that the consumer finds it easy to plan, book and pay. It is a good point, and we will see it evolve.
Laura Holloway: Our car club allows you to book a journey. If you want a car at a certain location at a certain time, you go to the app and book it and it is there for you when you get there. That service is there. It is the same with the Brompton bikes at Russell Square. You can make a reservation. You do not have to take potluck and turn up and find that the person before you has the last Brompton. You book it when you want it for this day at these hours, and then it is there for you when you turn up. You have a reservation. We offer that service as well.
To your point, we do a lot of work with train stations with our car club vehicles outside, particularly on the east coast. You do not want to turn up at Berwick-upon-Tweed and think, "I’ll get a car club vehicle", and there are none there. You can book it before you travel, so that it is reserved and you do not have to take that risk.
Q60 Lord Best: I have one micro question and one macro one. The micro one is: have you done any survey work and got the data on how many people already have a car? The people joining a car club avoid having to get a second or possibly even a third car, but they are not people like Lord Moylan who give up having a car. Do we know the proportions of people who have cars and who do not have cars who belong to car clubs?
Oz Choudhri: The survey that we referred to is a wider survey of all car club operators and asks whether you currently own a vehicle and, if so, how many. It also asks whether you have disposed of a vehicle as a result of joining a car club. It would be well worth sharing some of that information with you.
Lord Best: You cannot remember the proportion.
Oz Choudhri: Sorry. It is a big survey.
Lord Best: Okay. In another life, I have responsibilities for a development of 550 houses. We buy two smart cars for this but have not reduced the number of cars owned and parked on this site as a result of the car club. We think we have achieved fewer second or even third cars. Your statistics would be helpful.
My macro question is about how you engage in the process of ensuring some collaboration and co-operation with local authorities. I am familiar with the housing and development side. Local plans are compulsory. Local authorities must have a local plan, but for a transport plan and the strategic development of the area, you need to break into that discussion and there needs to be a process. Is it a compulsory requirement on all councils to have a strategic plan that offers the opportunity of consultation that engages with you and others? How does it work?
Laura Holloway: It is compulsory to have a local transport plan. The Government have said in their decarbonisation of transport strategy that all councils need to redo their transport plans in line with the objectives set out in it. They have promised a local authority toolkit, which talks about some of the things we have been talking about today and looks at the suite of options that a local authority can look at, from targeting corporate travel to mobility hubs and mobility as a service. It brings in lots of those different elements.
Lord Best: Have they promised this, but it does not exist yet?
Laura Holloway: I believe, to quote a government phrase, that it will be "published shortly". I do not know when that is, but hopefully it will be shortly. It is a good idea. To one of the points made at the outset, we have been asking for a while for some sharing of knowledge and best practice and some information, so that local authorities in quite complex areas, whose resources have been cut or lowered over the last few years, can have some assistance in developing that. I do not believe that there are any formal requirements in those transport plans to consult with industry or to have a strategic council that works on it with the private sector. I believe that they have to have normal public consultation, but that is as far as it goes in terms of specific requirements to consult.
Lord Best: Do you break into the discussion by introducing yourselves and saying, "Can we talk?"
Oz Choudhri: Yes. Your point about developers is valid. We see that area emerge. Developers, either pre-planning application or maybe when a planning application has been rejected, tend to engage with us from a transport strategy perspective and talk to us about deploying our multimodal services. It is a combination of them approaching us and us actively engaging them. We often see local authorities at planning applications giving guidance at feedback. but it is not compulsory.
On the toolkit that Laura referred to, I know that the Energy Saving Trust, as part of the Department for Transport, was putting that together and will be deploying that as guidance.
Q61 The Earl of Lytton: Good morning. The session has been interesting so far. We have touched a bit on data and that sort of thing. My question is about how that works and how the innovation helps to create services that meet the customer demand.
I am particularly interested in your outlining, if you can, what I might call the data landscape. How is the travel pattern information garnered? I am not asking for any state secrets, but, in general terms, how do you actually do it, and how far do you drill down into individual journey patterns? Again, knowing that data can be a bit proprietorial and that people guard their data quite carefully because they think it is valuable, how do you get on with sharing data with local authorities and perhaps other commercial collaborators in a scheme? I am interested to hear more about that data-gathering process.
Laura Holloway: I suppose the answer to that question is that it is a bit ad hoc in the way it actually works. When we talk about operations with the local authority, what is shared depends on the commercial negotiation and the type of scheme that has been set up.
The example that we used earlier, the GO-HI project up in Scotland, is interesting. They have decided to bring in the University of Leeds, and you may have heard from a member of that faculty earlier in this inquiry. It has a great team up there, and we do quite a lot of work with them. Kate Pangbourne works on that project and collects the data, so it is a third party that does it.
In a lot of cases, that makes operators a lot more willing to share data because it is anonymised and limits some of the GDPR issues that you might have. Sometimes those issues are real. Sometimes it is a convenient excuse for operators not to share that data, but in this case it works well, because the data is collected and used to assess where more services are needed, where it is working, and what the behavioural change is. Getting that data can inform whether it is working as a project and whether it is in the right places.
In other cases, it depends on that commercial negotiation. What has the local authority asked for? How does it want the data delivered? In our minds, one reason why we always say that local authorities sit in the middle for us is that we see them as the ones that should collect and have that data. Obviously we will use our own data to assess and expand our own services, but part of it for us is allowing the local authority to decide whether it works in that area as well.
To your point, it is ad hoc and dependent on commercial negotiations. The Department for Transport is looking at this in the context of mobility as a service and is doing a code of practice and looking at whether it can build in some kind of data standards or data requirements. The other issue is that the way data is collected is so different between different organisations. There is no standard way of reporting, collecting or maintaining data. Sometimes sharing and combining that data can be challenging.
The Earl of Lytton: Mr Choudhri, is that your view, too?
Oz Choudhri: It is, yes. My experience from the project in Scotland is that it took some time to get the operators to be able to provide the data. Everyone assumed that operators have a back-office system that will give you the data. You also have to give operators time to upgrade or to find solutions to provide what you say is at least a minimum set of requirements for collecting the right type of data. That is where the local authorities can be helpful.
We have found that local authorities historically have good data, particularly on movements in the regions, with reference to public transport. One ask is for local authorities to make that data more available. You can understand where some of the gaps are and how you can evolve services. They are similar to the points Laura made.
The Earl of Lytton: I suppose that if you introduce something that is innovative and catches on, that itself starts to alter the whole pattern and the way things operate and is a causative factor, which must make dealing with any sort of cost-benefit analysis of what you plan to do pretty difficult.
Laura Holloway: Yes, it does. Also, there are so many different factors and so much complexity when you look at behavioural change, and measure raw economics and real figures versus the more anecdotal behavioural factors. Combining those two and the standard best practice way of doing that can also be a challenge.
Oz Choudhri: It would be great if we could do more projects with trials, because by their nature they allow us to generate data and show the good, bad and indifferent, what works and what does not, and how to evolve those. It is important that we do more trials in this country as we look at connecting transportation better and challenging behaviour.
The Earl of Lytton: Point taken. Thank you.
Q62 Lord Haselhurst: Thank you. I must confess that my knowledge of car clubs is non-existent, not having done that. I cannot help feeling that it can be no more than a niche solution rather than a universal solution to the issues that we are discussing. I try to imagine how it works. I share Lord Berkeley's concern that there can be a weak link in the chain. A car presumably has to be brought to you or you have to walk to where the car is to be found in a bay. Finding enough bays, if the thing works for people, is in itself a problem.
Mr Choudhri referred to good old-fashioned walking. A lot of people are now rather frightened of old-fashioned walking, particularly at certain times of night. The other worry I have is how it copes in practice with, say, a concert at the Manchester Arena disgorging its audience, who may not be altogether rational and objective by that time of the night. If you want to go to a major football stadium like the Etihad in Manchester, a tram is by far the best way of doing it. Perhaps we are looking for those larger solutions. You are part of a chain. The more parts of a chain there are, the greater risk that one of them will prove inadequate.
Laura Holloway: Yes. We definitely see ourselves as part of a chain. We are not the whole solution in any respect. On your examples, if you come out of Manchester Arena, the tram or the train is the option you should take. A car club would necessarily not be the solution for those kinds of situations.
We are part of that chain. We look at different ways of hosting our services. It is not just a car club. The rental element is also important to people, because sometimes people want a vehicle for longer. They want it for a weekend. They want it for an evening. You might rent a vehicle as well. We have over 100,000 of vehicles across the UK that people rent, whether for corporate travel or personal use. There are those differences, too.
To your point about the weak link in the chain, that is the case when you make any kind of journey. It is finding the right journey and the right mode for the right consumer. You will never find a one-size-fits-all solution here. People have to deal with those issues anyway about what to do if, for example, you miss the bus or the train. It is about how those things fit together and the back-up options. It is about making sure that you have choice and the right mode for the right journey, and about understanding that nobody has a solution for everybody.
If it is dark and people do not want to walk to a car club vehicle, maybe they could get the bus instead. Maybe in that situation they need to get the train or a taxi or ask someone to give them a lift. There are lots of different ways of doing it. It is about making sure that the consumer has choice rather than always relying on a private vehicle just because it is sitting out there on the driveway.
Oz Choudhri: The project in Scotland that I talked about is now multimodal and integrated. That came about because historically Enterprise Car Club offered car club services to the Highland Council. Again, it is a very rural area, but we had proved—there is a case study and we will share that information and data with you after the session—that by launching our services for staff travel we had reduced their financial dependency on mileage reimbursement and reduced their CO2, which they had been able to document.
The point there is that it gave all of us who operated in that area confidence that we could then apply to the Scottish Government fund for the bigger project, which was to integrate. In this instance, the car club has acted almost as a catalyst for change and has given good insight into potential demand where the consumer is prepared to look at an alternative to using a vehicle.
I do not believe that we are niche. I appreciate your point that it is a growing sector, but a combination of all these modes of transport—car clubs, active travel, micromobility—is needed to give the consumer more choice to make them aware of that choice. I believe that that is where we play a key role, and where we are commercially viable. We came to this project because the Highland Council knew that it made commercial sense to have Enterprise Car Club operate in the region of 47 vehicles in the Highlands and Islands, which is a big investment and well worth pointing out.
Laura Holloway: That case study was on the Highlands Council's grey fleet and was in the transport decarbonisation plan which the Government released as a case study of a catalyst for change.
Q63 Lord Carrington of Fulham: I am fascinated by what you were saying about the operation in the Highlands, because I want to explore with you the integration with other transport modes and the replacement of different ways of travelling for people. But if you take what you have done in the Highlands and do it in the West Midlands, for the sake of argument, you have a completely different problem.
I am old and this was long before your time, but in the old days Godfrey Davis—God bless him—would have some sort of car hire service at a railway station. You hired your car, used it for the day and came back to the railway station. I can understand that that collapsed partly because there was no parking near the Victorian railway stations and partly also because Godfrey Davis was run extremely badly.
If you have a railway station, for instance, and somebody comes into a town or into a suburb and needs to go somewhere but cannot get a bus, your service, as I understand it, is a viable alternative for them. It is pre-booked and it will be there at the railway station for them, which is fine if you have a business traveller or a typical member of your car club who is replacing an existing vehicle and is reasonably affluent.
A lot of the problems in transport are not for people who have money, because people who have money have alternatives. They are for people who do not have disposable income. You obviously have to make a profit, and I am not suggesting that you should subsidise, but in order to get an integrated solution to a transport structure based on different forms of mobility—trains, buses, car clubs, car hire, bicycles, whatever—money has to lubricate that. You mentioned that the West Midlands gave everybody who gave up their polluting diesel engine car £3,000 to use on other means of transport. Presumably it was a one-off amount.
I am trying to get to the numbers. How much subsidy would a local authority or the Department for Transport or whoever—who had to pay for it would depend on where it was—have to give you to run the sort of service where buses were not an appropriate solution to providing onward transport for somebody coming into a bus station or a railway station? How does that work? Can it work? Is it impossible?
Oz Choudhri: For the Coventry scheme you referenced, there were seven wards in Coventry, and the wards selected by the council were what you might deem the less affluent. The whole purpose was to bring more choice and more affordable choice. They were also prescriptive. They offered modes of transport that were, when you look at them, affordable. We are talking about rent-a-bike for a few pounds an hour.
We liked that scheme, because we did not receive a subsidy just to place the vehicles in and around Coventry but we were incentivised because we knew that it had the mobility credit scheme. Coventry had assigned £1 million to that scheme and the goal was to try to get at least 200 residents to sign up. They have not hit that quota yet, but they have had lots of applications.
Birmingham City Council, through funding received through the Department for Transport from the future transport zone funding, probably allocated close to something like £6 million to subsidise the change in behaviour and to act as a catalyst.
It is difficult to give you a pound amount of what we need, because we diversify the consumer. Once we placed the car club in Coventry, we actively looked for other markets to generate revenue; I made the point about Warwick University. In some instances, those revenues will also subsidise that potentially more affordable model for the local residents. We have to take it on a case-by-case basis, because maybe the markets are not established, but I wanted at least to give you some figures that I saw for the subsidy required. I suspect that it takes a lot of money to incentivise change.
Laura Holloway: On that railway stations point, we do a lot of work with LNER, particularly on the east coast. We place car club vehicles for people who use the services. They can take a vehicle and go off for the day or the weekend. We also have a huge number of locations. I can provide the exact information, because we have been looking at this internally. The number of our branches and our car clubs close to railway stations is high, and we have focused on that.
In the model that you talked about, someone who goes to Cornwall might get the train and can rent a car for the weekend instead of driving and getting stuck in traffic trying to get there. In the same way, if you go up to Northumberland, for example, which everyone should do because it is lovely, you can get car club vehicles from the station at Berwick. They are some of our most utilised vehicles, because we know the demand is there. We know the tourist demand is there. Every time we think there is additional demand and people are searching and cannot get vehicles, we can get more. It is about building up services based on demand, because, that way, it is commercially viable. We roll out our services incrementally, because we wait and we develop the demand, as Oz said. We put in a vehicle, we find the demand and we add some more if there is additional demand. It is based on usage, so that it is viable. It is not here today and then in six months' time we take it away again.
Lord Carrington of Fulham: I am trying to get to some understanding as to how you integrate your service with the public benefit services provided by councils. Can you do that? Would your business model cope with that to enable you to go to a local authority—or a local authority to come to you—and say, "We want to pay you to provide a public service at a price lower than your normal commercial rate"?
Oz Choudhri: We were part of a project with Transport for Greater Manchester and, again, launched a multimodal platform. As part of that project—it was a very short trial—it had received some funding from the EU at the time. It was subsidising some ticketing to see what the effect was on adoption and behaviour. In that instance, the bus operator, rather than us as a car club operator, looked to receive some subsidy to make up the deficit in ticketing.
There is an opportunity to do so, but initially at this stage, and given where this sector is, we need to understand first how we can integrate those modes. The role is in making sure that there is an operating environment for us to all collaborate in. It will require investment and seeding of the market. Local authorities will want to spend some of that funding on marketing. There needs to be a strong awareness campaign. Some of that subsidy needs to allow the project to evolve.
They will also need to focus on deploying new services or enhancing them. In Scotland, for example, the dial-a-ride service, which was basically providing transportation for patients and residents, was upgraded so that it was on demand. To some extent, it was giving the consumer better access. Rather than always picking up the phone, they had the choice of using the phone or using a digital platform. Maybe that subsidy has played a strong role there.
Our role as a car club operator in that environment is to ensure that we are well aligned with those services, jointly market them because that is important, and maybe bring in more consumers who initially face not just the car club but adopting other services.
Lord Carrington of Fulham: Dial-a-ride is quite interesting. It fits exactly into what I am trying to get to. It is provided to people who have no money for the most part. You were replacing a dial-a-ride, because you did not have a van but you had a car for somebody. Do I understand what you were saying?
Oz Choudhri: In this instance, it was Moray Council, and the existing dial-a-ride was running shuttle buses. We upgraded the technology that allowed you to book those shuttle buses. They still provide predominantly transportation for patients and local residents. At the same time, there is an opportunity when they are not being used to access those services and to bring in more consumers. They need to grow demand to keep them commercially viable.
Lord Carrington of Fulham: Were you behind the software rather than the vehicles?
Oz Choudhri: The project provided the software to upgrade, with a view to expanding the project as well and adding more assets.
Laura Holloway: We also, in some cases, provide vehicles directly for the kinds of services run by the local authority. In the future, it might be a matter of adding that technology.
Lord Carrington of Fulham: Is that your commercial vehicle hire business?
Oz Choudhri: It is.
Laura Holloway: Yes, exactly, but we look to build in that demand-responsive travel element when we look at mobility-as-a-service platforms. We have had conversations with providers where we provide the vehicles and the technology and they provide the service. There are different elements to that. Traditionally we do not provide services that have a driver. People would self-drive. It is a slightly different type of service.
The Chair: Thank you. On that note, that you are a diversified business and not just car share, and on the examples you have given us, we will end the session today. You have kindly offered to follow up on a number of data issues, which we would appreciate, to keep us in touch with the way things are. Thank you so much for an excellent session.
