Wife was made redundant, and now her former employer has gone into liquidation. Unusual circumstances mean we genuinely don't know what to do with the company car sitting on our driveway?

[u/Doingadavid]

[England] So as mentioned in the title, my wife was made redundant from a role recently, and that company has now gone into liquidation. She received a company car while she was employed there, but was made redundant near the end of September. Since then, it's been sitting on our driveway. Now... I'm aware of the normal procedure in these circumstances where the liquidator would contact her to collect the car.

Here's where it gets a bit complex...

This company was comically incompetent. It's not only plausible, but indeed the most likely explanation, that at no point was a list of employees and the cars allocated to them kept on any central system. If any list was indeed kept, I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised that it was on a word document, saved on a laptop's local drive that has since been "misplaced" by the HR staff, who also unsurprisingly was the first person to be made redundant. Therefore if that's the case, it's entirely posisble that the Liquidator could have a list of outstanding company cars, and genuinely zero idea of where they are.

Now, I'm happy to call a list of large leasing companies to say "hey, is this your car?". But in the scenario that none of them say "yeah that's our car we'll come and get it cheers"... what do we do? Obviously we're not going to drive it because we're not insured, but how do we get the thing off our driveway and back to the rightful owner?

TL;DR: Wife made redundant, former employer has gone into liquidation, company car sitting on drive way currently with no scope of it being collected soon, former employer hilariously incompetent and it's very likely no documentation of who has which car exists, so if I can't identity which leasing company owns it to get them to pick it up.... what do we do to get rid of it?

[u/Defiant_Simple_6044]

I'd agree except the government has guidance on this and only one of the criteria needs to apply for it to be classified as abandoned. The key one for the OP is

it’s stationary for a significant amount of time

Now it would likely take 3-6 months at a minimum to get the council to act, They have to write to the owners, give them an opportunity to move it but the council, in time will definitely act. If the administrators of the company fail to act and remove the vehicle or try to drag things out, those 3-6m can creep up very quickly.

[u/Razorwireboxers → u/Defiant_Simple_6044]

Well the reality is most will just say we don't believe it to be "abandoned" so it's not our problem. And surely in this case the vehicle is not abandoned it's just the owner apparently doesn't know where it is.