It has been a busy few months for Northgate. With Blakedale and Fridge Express now fully integrated under a unified banner, and Redde (the group’s insurance replacement hire
It has been a busy few months for Northgate. With Blakedale and Fridge Express now fully integrated under a unified banner, and Redde (the group’s insurance replacement hire business) folded into folded into Zigup, the group that owns Northgate, the dust is only just settling on a period of significant structural change. Fleet World sat down with Neil McCrossan to find out what the new ‘one fleet’ model actually means for customers on the ground, and how Northgate is navigating everything from EV adoption to the arrival of budget Chinese commercial vehicles.
For McCrossan, the consolidation wasn’t simply about administrative tidiness, it was a direct response to how customers were already behaving. “Our customers were telling us it was time to do this,” he says. When Northgate acquired Blakedale and Fridge Express, the priority was retaining the specialist expertise in those businesses without alarming existing customers by absorbing them wholesale into “the bigger Northgate machine”. So the brands, and their teams, were initially kept separate.
But it quickly became clear that customers weren’t thinking in those terms. “More and more customers were trading with different parts of the organisation, but having to have a Blakedale account, a Fridge Express account and a Northgate account,” McCrossan explains. Larger customers in particular wanted cars, standard vans, traffic management vehicles and refrigerated vehicles from a single supplier, but were receiving separate invoices and dealing with separate account managers for the privilege. “We thought, there’s no time like now that we can sweep this up and make it easier for our customers, and easier for us,” he explains.
The result is a single fleet, managed through one platform, with one branch network delivering multiple brand liveries and vehicle types. Crucially, McCrossan is keen to stress that customers haven’t lost the relationships they valued. “If you were traditionally a Blakedale customer, you’ll now have a Northgate Highways account, because we’re rebranding the business, but through that account, you can access any part of the business, any vehicle, any service and keep the relationship with the people you know best. We don’t force you to change it.”
The benefits extend well beyond the vehicles themselves. Ancillary services, including fleet management and accident management, that were previously seen as core Northgate offerings are now available to every customer across the group, regardless of which brand they originally signed with. Behind the scenes, that’s meant untangling legacy systems built up across multiple acquisitions: standardising terms and conditions, and building a single unified communications environment. “It sounds easy, but it was actually quite challenging,” McCrossan admits. “We crossed lots of legacy platforms and systems.” The outcome, he says, is a single email and telephony environment that allows calls and enquiries to be routed and turned around far more efficiently; a tangible improvement that customers are already noticing.
Underpinning all of this is a broader philosophy about what ‘mobility’ should actually mean as an industry term. McCrossan is candid about his frustration with rivals who, in his view, have simply rebranded car rental as mobility without changing the underlying proposition. Northgate’s advantage, he argues, is that critical services sit in-house rather than with third parties: its own workshops, its own body shops, its own fleet management and fuel card products. “We thought, no, we can actually take a real proposition to market,” he says. “Customers feel like we can look after their needs in pretty much one place.”
With Northgate targeting an aggregate fleet size of 80,000 vehicles under the new model, maintaining a reliable supply pipeline, particularly for complex LCV requirements, remains a live challenge. McCrossan credits “robust, long-term relationships” with a wider roster of OEMs and supply chain partners than the business has ever had, partly reflecting genuine growth in the number of manufacturers now competing in the space.
orecasting demand accurately, though, is as much art as science. “We’ll always have a vehicle-on-hire plan that says we’re going to have this many vehicles on hire by this point,” says McCrossan. New business is a known certainty, but the specific mix of vehicle types is often impossible to predict until those customers are actually on the books. “You need that flexibility and the ability to react,” he says, describing a “fluid fleet” held across the estate specifically to respond quickly when new demand materialises.
Honesty with customers about realistic lead times is, in his view, non-negotiable. “We can be honest and say, yeah, we can get you that next week, we can get you that in three weeks. That’s going to be a six-month build slot, and that’s just the reality.” He’s careful to note that vehicle availability has improved substantially compared with the difficult post-Covid years, even if the era of manufacturers being able to simply push product onto the market is unlikely to return.
Northgate’s own research from its EV open days suggests the biggest barrier to van electrification is no longer vehicle availability, but operational education: driving range, payload degradation, and cost comparisons against diesel. McCrossan sees this as central to the role of Drive2Zero, Northgate’s EV consultancy arm. “Fleet managers can be understandably risk-averse, it’s a decision you’re making for the next four or five years, and you want to get it right,” he says.
The open days let customers “dip a toe in the water” without commitment, while Drive2Zero’s diagnostic approach is deliberately vendor-neutral. “We aren’t pushing an agenda that says electric vehicle. If you’re thinking about it, let us gather your fleet data, put it through our diagnostics, and come back and say: these vehicles, doing that job, in that way, you absolutely could deploy electric vehicles here, and here’s the range of vehicles with the carrying capacity that would fit the bill, and here are the prices.” Diesel equivalents remain on the table too, alongside practical considerations such as charging capacity at depots and engagement with district network operators.
Driver resistance, McCrossan notes, is a recurring but often short-lived issue. “It’s usually subjective and objective, but when drivers give the vehicles a chance, they absolutely love them.” Northgate’s flexible hire model is central to lowering that barrier: customers can trial electric LCVs on short-term arrangements before committing to longer-term funding, moving from a handful of vehicles through successive case studies until they’re comfortable enough to sign a longer agreement, one that, even then, retains more flexibility than a formal lease or outright purchase.
Charging infrastructure is treated as inseparable from the vehicles themselves. Northgate has recently exited the domestic installation market, unable to make the economics work at scale, but has deliberately retained commercial installation capability in-house. “If you’re talking seriously to a business about taking on a fleet of electric vehicles, you shouldn’t be saying, phone someone else about the charging,” McCrossan argues. “We don’t want to be dealing with somebody over the fence.” That includes recognising infrastructure needs will shift over a vehicle’s three-to-five-year lifecycle, requiring the same flexibility Northgate applies to the vehicles themselves.
On the recent influx of budget-focused Chinese commercial vehicles, McCrossan strikes a measured tone: open-minded, but not rushing to embrace unproven products. Parts availability and workshop support are key concerns for vehicles outside Northgate’s own servicing capability. Customer demand remains the primary signal: “If customers come forward and say we like this product and it works for us, that’s a good indication the product is right.” Today, new-entrant vehicles make up close to zero of Northgate’s fleet, though McCrossan acknowledges the picture has shifted considerably since early post-Covid visits to Chinese manufacturers, when pricing aspirations and product capability were often unrealistic. “Now we’re in a much better place. Price point is aggressive, capability of the product is much, much better.” Even so, he expects fleet buyers’ natural conservatism to slow adoption for some time yet.
Zigup’s collaboration with Microsoft to accelerate AI adoption across the group is still being rolled out rather than fully deployed, but McCrossan is already enthusiastic about early results, particularly around utilisation, fleet distribution, and shortening the time between OEM order and a vehicle landing at a branch. With multiple legacy systems across the business, he sees AI’s real value in pulling disparate data together and surfacing insights faster than was previously possible. Self-described as approaching new technology “with a certain reticence”, McCrossan says he’s been “personally amazed” at how usable and unintimidating it has proven in practice.
On the wider uncertainty around EV adoption timelines, with OEMs recalibrating ambitions, infrastructure providers questioning registration forecasts, and government policy under review, McCrossan sees a mixed picture among fleet operators. Some are pausing entirely, waiting to see how the landscape settles; others are mid-cycle and need to replace vehicles regardless, even if they’re not yet ready to commit fully to electric. Both scenarios, he notes, favour Northgate’s flexible model over traditional long-term contract hire or outright purchase. “Uncertainty, generally, isn’t a good thing,” he reflects, “Although perversely, it’s actually quite good for the Northgate business model.”
