Exploring SME sustainable mobility practices and behavioural spillover effects

Within domestic transport, the current carbon budget delivery plan has overshot the Climate Change Committee's 6th budget by 224 megatons, equivalent to 10 times the reduction observed during the pandemic (22MtC) [1]. The CCC estimates 62% of emission reductions depend on behaviour change. However, transport behaviour is influenced by many complex, highly contextual and interacting factors that are difficult to change: infrastructure, habits, built environment, culture and social norms.

Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs; businesses of less than 250 staff) are often embedded and inter-connected within the local context [2] and may therefore be able to tackle these challenges. Due to increasing supply chain reporting requirement, all businesses are facing incentives to reduce scope 3 emissions, including staff commutes. As increasing attention is placed on decarbonising SMEs, this thesis will explore their mobility practices and potential for change - including understanding the current SME sustainable mobility policy context, designing demand reduction and/or modal shift interventions, and evaluating their effects.
The first study uses interviews with decision makers responsible for implementing current mobility plans to understand what is currently in place and how these decisions are made. Questions include: What barriers and challenges do they experience, and in SMEs that have been successful, what facilitated this? Does the organisation's culture and risk preferences influence acceptability or implementation? Organisations often do not consider commuting or customer travel as their responsibility - when and why is this true?

The second study recruits employees from SMEs from different segments (e.g. rural-urban, different sectors or sizes) for a Stated Preference survey. In this Discrete Choice Experiment, we explore employees' willingness to accept different mobility policies to estimate the value placed on different attributes such as perceived fairness, cost, co-benefits and perceived efficacy. At what rate are employees willing to trade these attributes off? And how does this vary between segments?

The third study explores the link between participatory approaches, policy support, employees' perceived effectiveness and intervention efficacy. Could the act of deliberating be used as a moment to disrupt the commute and encourage modal shift? In a field experiment, employees would be invited to a participatory workshop to encourage deliberative decision making and communal goal setting. This intervention would leverage the group dynamics and embeddedness of an SME. Success is measured according to the Avoid-Shift-Improve framework i.e., number of trips converted to hybrid meetings, modal choice for business/commute/leisure, and policy acceptability respectively. Leisure modal choice would be used to evaluate contextual spillover effects - when a change in one behaviour (commute) influences other behaviours (leisure travel) often arising from changes in motivation or preferences from adopting new behaviours [3].
The final study explores different kinds of spillover effects. This study may explore contextual (influencing leisure travel), interpersonal (influencing family's travel behaviour), or other PEB spillover (influencing sustainable workplace behaviours). Spillover effects have been linked to group dynamics "facilitating a sense of efficacy" and support by a trusted character [4]. These variables may be enhanced in a SME. Some evidence suggests that changing 'easier' behaviours first facilitate more challenging changes [5,6], such as transport behaviour.

Together four studies will explore how mobility policies can be designed for, and implemented by, SMEs to reduce COe associated with staff commuting and facilitate the social transformation required to achieve Net Zero. The output of this thesis will be a series of documents to provide guidance for SMEs in implementing policies.

Impact Summary

This proposal has been developed from the ground up to guarantee the highest level of impact. The two principal routes towards impact are via the graduates that we train and by the embedding of the research that is undertaken into commercial activity. The impact will have a significant commercial value through addressing skills requirements and providing technical solutions for the automotive industry - a key sector for the UK economy.

The graduates that emerge from our CDT (at least 84 people) will be transformative in two distinct ways. The first is a technical route and the second is cultural.

In a technical role, their deep subject matter expertise across all of the key topics needed as the industry transitions to a more sustainable future. This expertise is made much more accessible and applicable by their broad understanding of the engineering and commercial context in which they work. They will have all of the right competencies to ensure that they can achieve a very significant contribution to technologies and processes within the sector from the start of their careers, an impact that will grow over time. Importantly, this CDT is producing graduates in a highly skilled sector of the economy, leading to jobs that are £50,000 more productive per employee than average (i.e. more GVA). These graduates are in demand, as there are a lack of highly skilled engineers to undertake specialist automotive propulsion research and fill the estimated 5,000 job vacancies in the UK due to these skills shortages. Ultimately, the CDT will create a highly specialised and productive talent pipeline for the UK economy.

The route to impact through cultural change is perhaps of even more significance in the long term. Our cohort will be highly diverse, an outcome driven by our wide catchment in terms of academic background, giving them a 'diversity edge'. The cultural change that is enabled by this powerful cohort will have a profound impact, facilitating a move away from 'business as usual'.

The research outputs of the CDT will have impact in two important fields - the products produced and processes used within the indsutry. The academic team leading and operating this CDT have a long track record of generating impact through the application of their research outputs to industrially relevant problems. This understanding is embodied in the design of our CDT and has already begun in the definition of the training programmes and research themes that will meet the future needs of our industry and international partners. Exchange of people is the surest way to achieve lasting and deep exchange of expertise and ideas. The students will undertake placements at the collaborating companies and will lead to employment of the graduates in partner companies.

The CDT is an integral part of the IAAPS initiative. The IAAPS Business Case highlights the need to develop and train suitably skilled and qualified engineers in order to achieve, over the first five years of IAAPS' operations, an additional £70 million research and innovation expenditure, creating an additional turnover of £800 million for the automotive sector, £221 million in GVA and 1,900 new highly productive jobs.

The CDT is designed to deliver transformational impact for our industrial partners and the automotive sector in general. The impact is wider than this, since the products and services that our partners produce have a fundamental part to play in the way we organise our lives in a modern society. The impact on the developing world is even more profound. The rush to mobility across the developing world, the increasing spending power of a growing global middle class, the move to more urban living and the increasingly urgent threat of climate change combine to make the impact of the work we do directly relevant to more people than ever before. This CDT can help change the world by effecting the change that needs to happen in our industry.