Safety first as St Boswells car dealership plans layout changes

Border Toyota has submitted an application to Scottish Borders Council planners to allow car parking on an approved site to ensure all staff and customers can remain two metres apart.

That request follows the business, shut since the UK-wide coronavirus lockdown began in March, carrying out a risk assessment and identifying changes needing to be made internally and externally before it can reopen.

To keep staff and customers safe, the company is to install hand-sanitising stations, place limits on the numbers of staff and customers allowed inside at any one time, provide floor and wall markings indicating safe distances to keep from other people and introduce paperless transactions.

Social distancing rules dictate it must also change the external layout of its site so that staff and customers are able to park safely and keep far enough away from each other.

Staff currently park as many as 40 vehicles up to three deep behind the garage’s service in a yard, but guidelines on safe parking will not allow that to continue.

Company managing director Archie Maclean said: “The staff that arrive earliest for work are then leaving first, which means that two to three cars need to be moved to allow them to get out.

“Parking tightly side by side is now not safe, and we need to provide parking which allows cars to be spaced so that we achieve social distancing, and the only part of the site we can achieve that is in the test-drive area.

“Customers will be asked to visit by appointment and will be allocated a designated parking space for their use.

“On every occasion that a customer brings a vehicle to us for either sales or service, before any of our staff can access it we will require to sanitise it, and after we have worked in the vehicle we will require to sanitise it again before the customer can go into it.

“Operationally, that means we need to have wider parking spaces so that our sanitising staff can work without another vehicle being too close to them, and the result is we require to create more customer parking as close as possible to the building.

“The additional customer parking can only be created by utilising some of the current vehicle storage spaces, so we need to replace that storage space by moving some of it into the test-drive area.

“We plan to leave the south side of the test-drive area as an area to test-drive hybrid, electric and driverless cars.

“These are very challenging times for all of us, and we must follow government guidelines and Toyota franchise standards if we are to protect staff and customers and safeguard the jobs of our staff.”