QSi Awards winner profile- Belgraves of London

The Big Picture

Jason ikpedJian is a bit of a film buff. The clues are there in Belgraves’ new head office – from the signed Back to the Future poster on the wall to the giant model of James Bond’s Aston Martin DB5 on the boardroom table.

And if Hollywood’s finest scriptwriters were adapting the Belgraves story for the big screen, it’d be a feel-good movie – but with a few plot twists. The story of how one of London’s most successful high-end chauffeur firms weathered the storm of the pandemic and bounced back better and stronger.

To do so, Jason had to do battle with some serious villains, not based on a remote island but in a faceless office block in the city – you guessed it –our white cat stroking baddies are not Spectre, but good old TfL.

There’s something of a spy movie about the location of Belgraves’ new office. On a suburban street in Sutton, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it alleyway between two semis leads to a gate – behind which is a courtyard with generous parking area and a well equipped, single-storey office. Very calm and relaxed, and from the street, you’d have no idea it was there.

It’s a perfect base for a business that prides itself on offering a discreet, high-end service to a wide sweep of private and corporate clients. And at Professional Driver, we know how good Belgraves is –the seven QSi Awards on the boardroom mantlepiece tell their own story.

After a tough time during the pandemic, which saw the fleet reduced to just 7 cars, Belgraves bounced back quickly, and now the fleet is at 18 – as big as it’s ever been. And it’s not been without growing pains, Jason says.

“There’s a hell of a lot of work involved in keeping quality levels up when you get close to 20 cars. When you think you’re on top of things, you find more issues.”

The fleet’s about to grow again, with another Range Rover on order, and then one or two armoured BMW X5s for security work. At the same time, older cars are being sold as some of the more demanding clients insist on being picked up in cars that are no more than three years old.

With many chauffeurs complaining about the difficulty in sourcing new cars, how easy has Belgraves found it to renew the fleet? “It’s been ok. If I want BMW i7s I can get them (through BMW’s own chauffeur programme). I normally would order now for March with the new 24 plate.”

Also on order are four new-shape Mercedes-Benz EQVs electric people-movers. Belgraves has been an enthusiastic early adopter of the EQV since it was launched in 2020, and Jason is looking forward to the upgraded interiors of the new version – which looks very similar to the previous model but is almost completely new.

However, he does acknowledge that there are limitations with going electric. And despite an enormous commitment to going green, which saw Belgraves share the Gold QSi Environment award with Addison Lee last November, to some extent Jason is going “back to the past” with some of his fleet.

Of course TfL will no longer allow a non-electric vehicle to be licensed after the end of this year, so operators are having to be creative when it comes to licensing. And that means having to license some cars outside London.

“We just got our Castle Point license – mainly as a back-up,” Jason says. “We do really believe in sustainability but we have kept two 20-plate diesel V-Classes. But we are getting comments from customers about 20-plate cars, so we will have to replace them.”

Castle Point, in Essex, has become a good alternative option for licensing – Jason is full of praise for its customer handling and fast response to enquiries. “I had a question for Castle Point, so I rang up and got straight through to the right person – that never happens with TfL.”

There’s also the question of cost. “We have just renewed our TfL license at a cost of £6,000 for up to 20 vehicles. Our Castle Point one is £400, for unlimited vehicles,” Jason says.

He’s at pains to stress that Belgraves is not planning to transfer all its cars to Castle Point. Rather it will simply hold dual licenses. “We’ve just got the Castle Point license as a back-up – a good thing to have in your pocket,” Jason says.

Belgraves may have been an enthusiastic early adopter of EQVs, but the electric MPV still has range limits that won’t do for some jobs. “There isn’t an alternative to V-class. For long-distance jobs, the only viable model is a diesel V-Class. If we can’t license new ones in London, I have to go somewhere else,” Jason says. And it’s not simply a case of keeping older diesels on the fleet. Some clients demand cars no more than three years old. So cars only bought in 2022 will need to be replaced in 2025.

“We don’t want to run petrol or diesel cars for the sake of it,” says Jason. “But we can’t fulfil long distance journeys with EVs. And we have a disabled regular client who has to have two bench seats –and you can’t do that in an EQV. So we have to have vehicles that fulfil those criteria.”

There has also been some negative reaction to EVs from clients recently. “We had problems with one client when the driver was trying to charge up and missed a phone call. The client said ‘don’t send an EV again’. We are getting some pushback but we’re trying to portray EVs in a positive manner,” Jason says.

And that’s where the Castle Point license comes in handy. The Deregulation Act means there is no problem with private hire vehicles registered outside London doing jobs within the TfL area – for the same reason Wolverhampton-licensed minicabs crop up in other cities all across the UK. “Clients don’t care where the car is registered,” Jason says.

Jason is in favour of national licensing standards for private hire, which would mean there was no issue with car and driver licensing anywhere in the UK. “We recently couldn’t employ a driver to do a job because he was licensed in Birmingham, not TfL. National licensing would fix that,” he says.

It would also stop TfL demanding cars be festooned with warning notices and complaints procedures. “We don’t need ‘no smoking’ signs

– we tell clients they can’t smoke in the cars.”

In contrast with Jason’s positive experiences with Castle Point, TfL’s customer care is “appalling”, he says. He embarks on a long tale explaining just how difficult it was to renew his operator’s license – a chaotic tale of sending documents repeatedly with very poor response, resulting eventually in a direct phone call to the head of licensing.

“You can’t call, have to email – but we had no response in 30 days. TfL is our regulator and we cannot communicate with them. I almost had to sue because we had no license the day before we had jobs,” he says, exasperatedly.

Even getting a new drivers’ app was an overly complicated procedure, taking two days to fill in a 1,500 page document, much of it repetitive and irrelevant. “TfL is a big thing for everybody at the moment,” he sighs.

With clients wanting a relatively new fleet, Belgraves is frequently trading stock. “We don’t do a huge amount of mileage – roughly 20,000 per year,” Jason says. This means there are plenty of takers for cars leaving the fleet – providing replacements can be found.

The relatively low mileages mean, unusually for a chauffeur fleet, Belgraves can get a lease deal for the cars, though it’s not without its problems – not least the admin charges for parking tickets and restricted zone transgressions – something that goes with the territory when chauffeuring round the City for security clients.

“We work with some security offices that will pay the tickets – but won’t pay admin fees – and have been getting admin charges of £30 per ticket from leasing companies. If you get a lot of them it adds up.”

Why such low annual mileages? “A lot of our work is in central London – and that means we we could have a car sitting outside a hotel all day, waiting for our client.

Hotels are becoming an important part of the client mix for Belgraves, and an area with potential for growth. “Hotel work offers good continuity of work for chauffeurs and good exposure for Belgraves in the back,” Jason says.

Belgraves is already working with the The Lanesborough, as well as other super-luxury hotels, mainly in Knightsbridge. “We’re targeting hotels in a specific areas as we can place cars nearby, which means we can get to any hotel within 5-10 minutes.”

At present, hotel work is only about 10% of the mix for Belgraves. The biggest customer bloc is middle eastern clients (40%), followed by embassies (25%), with the remaining 25% spread among corporate clients, security companies and private families.

Sustainability is a big issue for all these groups –especially hotels and corporates – and that means having to do things like replace plastic water bottles with reusable vessels made from recycled aluminum.

“There are still some things we want to do, including offsetting all our emissions to the extent where we become carbon-negative, which would justify running non-EVs on the fleet.”

Tyre issues

Punctures are an occupational hazard for anybody driving in London. Potholes, traffic restrictions and low-profile tyres on big rims are a combination likely to result in frequent trips to Kwik-Fit.

The situation is compounded by the lack of sparewheels, or in some case, even a tyre repair inflator kit, in some modern cars. The Mercedes-Benz EQV doesn’t come with anything at all, and there’s nowhere to put a spare anyway thanks to the battery pack.

Inevitably, when one of Belgraves’ EQVs experienced a puncture, all the driver could do was call Mercedes-Benz’s help line. It took an hour to get through and a further two hours before a technician turned up.

That’s time off the road that a chauffeur company can ill afford. So Jason has come up with an in-house solution. “We spent £10k on wheels and tyres so we have spare fronts and rears for every type of car on our fleet.”

That means Range Rover, EQV, BMW i7, Mercedes S580e and V-class diesel. “We’ve always got one wheel and tyre ready to go – so within an hour we can get it on the car and back on the road.”

These are kept at Sutton, and if a car has a puncture, a replacement wheel can be sent out in a car equipped with proper jacks and drills. As well as easing driver frustrations, the facility is a good pitch to clients too.