VEHICLE rental firm Anglian Willhire is celebrating its eighth birthday, with further growth in the pipeline to service corporate and private customers.

VEHICLE rental firm Anglian Willhire is celebrating its eighth birthday, with further growth in the pipeline to service corporate and private customers.

The company now operates a fleet of 3,850 vehicles from six depots in Ipswich, Norwich, Peterborough, Huntingdon, Bury St.Edmunds and Chelmsford and employs 131 staff.

It is all a far cry from spring 2000 when Anglian Self Drive, as it was then known, employed six staff and ran a fleet of 22 vans from a workshop and temporary office premises next door to a sewerage works in Ipswich.

Anglian Willhire is a key part of Northgate, the country's largest vehicle rental business with a fleet of 68.500 vehicles available to rent from 90 outlets across the UK.

Although the core of the business remains flexible, contract-free rental it has developed new services for customers by offering vehicle maintenance service through its recently modernised workshops by their team of highly trained engineers - available to businesses and private customers irrespective of whether they are rental customers.

In addition, the business has recently launched a “sale and rentback” concept to provide the means by which fleets can easily switch from the burden of ownership.

Managing director Richard Glinn, who has overseen every aspect of the company's growth having been the organisation's first employee, said: “The challenge was to build a business and create a company which was recognised in East Anglia as the best of its kind.

“Anglian Willhire has been growing steadily over the past eight years by extending its geographic coverage across the East Anglia, through the addition of more branches and making greater use of the facilities and services offered by the Northgate group.

“It is, I believe, this recipe of local management supported by the infrastructure of Britain's largest vehicle rental operation that has proved so successful in our expansion.”

Looking to the future, Mr Glinn - who is based at the Ipswich branch, which is also Anglian Willhire's administration centre - the company's main focus up to now had been on serving the business sector but it was now looking to increase its private customer base.

“We need to make more people aware that the largest vehicle hire company in East Anglia is on their doorstep and whatever size of vehicle they require and for however long a period of time, Anglian Willhire can deliver,” he added.