Staff at Denbighshire County Council, the local authority for a largely rural county in north east Wales, can book an electric van for work journeys and collect it from one of four sites, with use of the vehicle controlled by RFID readers fitted to the dashboards.
The council published details of the scheme on 29 September 2026. Its Fleet Service runs the pool, which was rolled out across the county after a smaller pilot, aiming to cut both the carbon emissions and the cost of business travel.
Vehicles are booked online and picked up at locations in Denbigh, St Asaph, Prestatyn and Llangollen. The council says the pool is supported by Toyota Proace EV and Citroen eC3 models, both of which it describes as vans.
What a dashboard reader does in a pool fleet
In a shared fleet, the reader in the cab is what turns a booking into an auditable trip. The driver presents a credential, normally a card or a fob, and the system records who took which vehicle and when. Depending on how the fleet is configured, that read can also release the vehicle for use, keep an unbooked driver out of the seat, and attribute mileage and charging to the right service without anyone filling in a paper log.
Denbighshire has not said which reader hardware, credential technology or booking platform it has chosen, and it has published nothing on the frequency or air interface in use. As general industry context rather than a detail of this deployment, dashboard-mounted pool-car readers are commonly HF contactless units working at 13.56 MHz, while some fleets still run LF fobs at 125 kHz.
Access is gated by training as well as by the card. Only staff who have completed the Fleet Service’s in-house EV course can book a pool vehicle. That course covers using the charging infrastructure safely and efficiently, making use of regenerative braking, and choosing a driving mode to suit conditions or payloads.
Part of a longer fleet transition
Denbighshire declared a climate and nature emergency in 2019 and has been adopting zero-emission vehicles, or ZEVs, ever since. More than 20 percent of its fleet vehicles were ZEVs when the pool scheme was announced. The Fleet Service has been moving end-of-life fossil fuel vehicles over to electric where appropriate, with support from Welsh and UK Government departments.
Electrification and driver identification tend to arrive together in the public sector, because a council that wants to claim a carbon saving needs trip-level data to evidence it with.
Martin Griffiths, Fleet Mobility Lead Officer at Denbighshire County Council, said: “As part of our Council Climate Change and Nature Recovery strategy we are committed to continue to reduce carbon emissions across the local authority, which includes our Fleet.”
He said private-car mileage was part of the reason for the scheme: “We are aware as a council that some staff use their own vehicles for business travel and these are more likely to be fossil fuel driven vehicles. This new scheme really provides the best of both worlds, staff as long as they complete the EV training can book one of these vehicles out to save the wear and tear on their car and mileage costs.”
Cllr James Elson, Lead Member for Environment and Transport, said: “Introducing a pool vehicle system is an important step in ensuring the Council makes the most effective use of its resources. By providing staff with access to vehicles for business travel, we can reduce reliance on private vehicles, help manage business mileage costs and ensure taxpayers receive better value for money.”
