The boss of First has apologised for “unacceptable” numbers of bus cancellations – as he warned services will be cut this autumn.
Doug Claringbold told a council meeting that the Government’s covid funding, which has kept many routes going throughout the pandemic, ends in October and a huge review of the network is taking place with the West of England Combined Authority (Weca) and other operators ahead of the “cliff-edge”.
The company’s regional managing director said passengers needed to know buses would turn up and that any new timetables had to have reliable services.
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But he said there was a significant gap between the money provided by Whitehall, which stops after September, to run 85 to 90 per cent of the pre-covid network mileage and the number of customers now using buses, which has only recovered to 75 per cent of levels before the pandemic, meaning many routes made losses.
However, South Gloucestershire Council scrutiny commission also heard from metro mayor Dan Norris and Stagecoach West MD Rachel Geliamassi that while some passengers would suffer in the short term, innovative ways of taking people where they needed to go were in the pipeline.
These include demand responsive transport where services are run on request, like taxis, multi-operator tickets, and minibuses replacing double deckers in rural areas, which would help ease the national bus driver shortage – the main cause of cancellations – because less training is needed.
Mr Claringbold told members: “The level of service that First has been delivering has not been acceptable because of the level of cancellations, largely driven by a shortage of trained bus drivers.”
He said many staff had been lured by the doubling or trebling of wages in the HGV sector while others had returned to Europe, and that Weca was helping huge efforts to recruit drivers, including more women, but that it would not happen overnight.
“I am sorry we have cancelled too many buses across the network.” the MD said.
“In October we need to have a timetable which is robust, so there will have to be some planned changes to bring us back into line where our resources meet the services we operate.
“We are not prepared to run a non-reliable service. We have to make sure we have a set of services people can rely on and not try to do too much.
“Those are the difficult decisions we have to make in terms of getting that service network operating in October.” He said routes needed to be considered more flexibly than simply the same times and frequency every night of the week.
Mr Claringbold said: “People’s lives are different now. We need different people to use the bus. “About 95 per cent of our passengers are travelling again but they are not travelling as much. The serial commuters who were travelling five to six days a week are travelling two or three days.”
West of England Labour mayor Mr Norris told the meeting at Kingswood civic centre on Wednesday, July 6: “We are having this bus review over the summer that will look at commercial services and supported services because the money from the Government is ending in the autumn quite abruptly.
“That is a cliff-edge, that will be tough, there will be cuts to services. I’m not going to hide the reality of that.”
He said £105million of government money for Weca’s Bus Service Improvement Plan to forge an “enhanced partnership” with operators could be used only for “new and innovative” services and not existing routes.
“We need to do some really smart thinking in consultation with local people to get that right,” he said. “In terms of rural communities, we need to think a bit differently. We don’t need great big buses trundling down very narrow country lanes.
“What we need is minibuses or similar and then you start dealing with the driver challenge because people don’t then have to have that particular licence that’s more sophisticated and harder to get – they could drive minibuses.
“The public will have to be reasonably patient because these things take time – this funding is over five years. In the longer-term we should be confident things are going to improve, but it will be bumpy in the shorter term.
“We should have some agreed rules that allow us to share that pain in the most just and fair way, and hopefully in the longer term we will have a much better service for people, but we are not there at the moment. There will always be some people who suffer, I’m afraid.”
Ms Geliamassi said the challenge to recruit drivers could be here for many years because of a mindset change for many seeking a work/life balance which was at odds with the industry’s shift work and that it took two to three months to train a driver but only one week to leave.
But she said she was optimistic because many of the transport ideas being discussed in the region were “ahead of their time”. Thornbury ward Lib Dem Cllr Jayne Stansfield said residents used penultimate evening buses because they could not depend on the last one turning up, which meant usage figures incorrectly suggested they were not needed.
Lib Dem group leader and Frampton Cotterell ward Cllr Claire Young said: “A bus that goes whizzing past you because it’s full is no better than a bus that does not turn up at all, and this is particularly an issue on the Y1 and T1 routes.”
She said many people got family to drive them to an earlier stop to ensure a seat on the bus, while some had decided to keep driving to Bristol. “By the time anything is done about this it will be too late,” she added.
Winterbourne ward Conservative Cllr Nic Labuschagne said: “We’ve had councillor after councillor talk about cancelled services. “The bus service is so unreliable, we have a crisis right now.”
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