THE ECONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT OF THE HISTORIC AND CLASSIC MOTOR INDUSTRY IN THE UK

34 Table 9: Economic impact of historic vehicle sales, 2019 Total revenue (£) GVA (£) Employment (FTEs) COE (£) Cars 1,210,139,698 386,479,655 6,314 148,543,771 Motorcycles 144,852,162 53,996,739 960 23,638,572 LGVs 269,314,581 33,068,981 540 12,710,090 HGVs 31,080,447 5,172,355 67 2,099,822 Buses 10,493,641 1,746,334 23 708,959 Others 92,580,499 15,407,087 199 6,254,818 Total 1,758,461,029 495,871,151 8,103 193,956,032 Source: DVLA, Octane, Car and Classic, Autotrader, eBay, Cebr analysis . 5.3 Classic vehicle rental Estimating the economic impact of classic vehicle rental is complex for several reasons. Bottom-up methodologies (those that rely on looking at firm or consumer-level data and building up a picture of the industry from this) are unreliable, as the industry is made up of many smaller firms. This means that financial data is relatively sparse, and confidently establishing that the majority of firms have been identified is difficult. In addition, many of the larger car rental firms for whom good data exists rely on relatively modern vehicle fleets, which are unlikely to contain many vehicles over 15 years old. For those that do have older vehicles in their fleet, establishing the relative economic impact attributable to these vehicles is complex, and ultimately not feasible. Instead, we have looked at wider evidence on the UK’s vehicle rental market and attempted to establish the proportion of this that is attributable to classic vehicles. By extrapolating data from a 2018 report for the BVRLA 12 , and adjusting for growth in the industry from 2017- 19, we estimate that the UK’s total vehicle rental i ndustry added £3.9 billion to UK GDP in 2019, employing over 14,500 FTE workers. From this, we separately looked at the car rental market (worth about ⅔ of the total vehicle rental industry) and the non-car rental market. To ascertain an approximate estimate for the share of the rental industry attributable to classic vehicles, we considered the percentage of total registered vehicles that are considered classic for each vehicle type. Adjustments were made to reflect several factors, including the absence of classic vehicles in the fleets for many of the largest car rental firms, the lower propensity for classic cars to be available to rent, the higher average rental price for classic cars 13 and the lower average rental price for older commercial vehicles. From these revenue estimates, we used wider data on average ratios between key economic variables (such as GVA/turnover or average turnover per FTE worker) from the ONS’s Annual Business Survey to estimate the full economic impact of the classic vehicle rental sector. Overall, we estimate that approximately 5% of the economic footprint of the UK’s vehicle rental sector is attributable to classic vehicles. The rental of classic vehicles generates approximately £272 million per annum in turnover, which adds £ 171 million to UK GDP through GVA contributions, directly employing nearly 800 FTE workers in 2019. These full impacts can be seen below, i n Table 10. 1 2 https://www.bvrla.co.uk/uploads/assets/uploaded/107f8a52-807d-4a00-95e8a67885c8a834.pdf 13 This is due to the proliferation of high-end classic vehicle rental firms, such as HCHG, BookAclassic, Bespokes and Web b’s of Weybridge.