Examination of Witnesses (Questions 280-299)
MR LES
WARNEFORD, MR
DENIS WORMWELL,
MS NICOLA
SHAW, MR
MIKE COOPER,
MR PETER
HUNTLEY AND
MR JOHN
WAUGH
28 JUNE 2006
Q280 Mr Martlew: Do schoolchildren
travelling on buses at peak times create a problem for you with
other customers? Should we be saying, especially with secondary
school children, that we should be bussing them on their own vehicles?
Mr Warneford: A small minority
of schoolchildren are a problem in some places. There are different
arrangements in different authorities as to how school transport
is organised. By and large, and inevitably there are some exceptions,
we work pretty well with the education departments of local authorities
and it is managed reasonably well.
Chairman: I do not want to go down that
particular road at the moment.
Q281 Mr Leech: Mr Warneford, you
said before that in certain areas you got increased bus patronage
but it is patchy and in other areas it declined. One of my criticisms
of bus companies is that where patronage is going up you are very
good at trying to continue to raise that bus patronage. Where
I think the bus operators struggle is where there is declining
patronage. What are the bus operators doing to try and arrest
that decline and turn it round? Is it a fair criticism that I
have that in many cases you are abandoning services that are declining
and concentrating on services that are improving?
Ms Shaw: Can I give you an example
that would help to illustrate the point? On one of our services
in West Yorkshire we experienced decline over some period and
we wondered why, so we set about asking people. We asked them
what they liked about our service and what they liked about services
provided by other operators in the area, and we asked people who
had used the bus in the past and people who were currently using
the bus. We tried to focus on those two categories because we
thought they were the most likely to be the people who would be
willing to come back and use us again or to increase their use.
We also provided the people who were not using the bus with free
travel to encourage them to come back and see what it was like.
As always in these surveys, we found out that reliability was
very high on their list, making sure the bus turned up and then
making sure the bus turned up and delivered them where they wanted
to get to at the time they expected. Interestingly they also,
on that route in particular, liked our drivers. People who had
experienced the interface with the drivers found that they had
good information and that they treated them with respect. So we
reinforced that campaign with the drivers to give them a sense
ownership of the route and we saw growth from those activities
to bring people back to the route. It does get down to that very
great level of detail to understand what people's travel habits
and to really understand at a route level what is going on. We
put in that investment because of course we only run buses and
we need people to ride on buses because that keeps us in business,
so we have to find why in some cases they do not travel with us
and they tend to decrease travel over time. It is that kind of
research about why people are using us less that has made quite
a big difference in getting people back on to the buses.
Chairman: We are running out of time
now, ladies and gentlemen. Mr Efford on this one?
Q282 Clive Efford: It is another
question leading on from that which is how do we overcome this
problem of the pressures on bus companies to deliver dividends
to shareholders but also the essential role that the bus services
play in tackling social exclusion, ie on the whole, bus services
that are needed essentially to be provided in areas that are maybe
not so profitable. How do we overcome that tension?
Mr Wormwell: In the West Midlands,
90% of the population live within 250 metres of a bus stop. As
we have already mentioned, we have a very extensive network of
over 70 million miles. We do provide a lot of services which are
cross-subsidised by more profitable routes. So where there is
a network in place we are able to provide a socially inclusive
service. Just to go back to something you said earlier, we are
all guilty of not doing enough to look at non-users. We all do
research on present usage and attitudes on surveys of our present
customers. We do need to do more to understand the people who
do not use us and have their own perceptions of the bus industry.
Q283 Chairman: I want to ask you
some questions and I would be grateful for brief answers. You
could all provide performance data to the Traffic Commissioners
voluntarily but you do not; why is that? Why do you not tell the
Traffic Commissioners what you are doing voluntarily?
Ms Shaw: From September we will
be publishing the data we do have on punctuality for all of our
companies. We do not have complete data for all routes for all
companies.
Q284 Chairman: You do not know what
is happening entirely on your routes, Ms Shaw? You are not telling
me that, are you?
Ms Shaw: We know exactly when
the route starts but we do not have information about all the
points along the route about what time the bus arrived there,
no.
Q285 Chairman: Is there anybody else
in the dark about various routes? Why do you not tell the Traffic
Commissioners? What is so terrible about the Traffic Commissioners
that they should not be given accurate information about your
performance? Mr Warneford?
Mr Warneford: Chairman, I do not
recall ever being asked to do so. I do not have a problem. Whenever
they ask for information they are always supplied with it.
Q286 Chairman: So they have to send
you a detailed letter each time asking you for stuff about which
you should know anyway under your normal management procedures?
Mr Warneford: If I can amplify,
we were asked two or three years ago by one Traffic Commissioner
because our service was not up to scratch and we had to fix it
to send the data regularly and we did, and eventually we were
asked to stop because it was information overload.
Q287 Mr Martlew: Just on that, the
train companies that Stagecoach run have to publish their punctuality.
Would that not be a good idea for your buses?
Mr Warneford: The only reason
we do not is we fear that the media would use it as another reason
to tell people they should not travel on buses.
Q288 Mr Martlew: Only if the information
is bad.
Mr Warneford: We can provide very
factual information but it will not say that buses run 100% on
time; they cannot.
Q289 Clive Efford: Can I just ask
though following on from that, Chairman, the Traffic Commissioners
have the power to fine bus operators for failure to operate services
in accordance with registered details. If they do not have that
information and do not even request it, how do they carry out
that function?
Mr Warneford: They monitor it
using their own staff or local authorities provide them with the
information.
Q290 Clive Efford: But they have
hardly any staff. The Traffic Commissioners have very few staff
to actually carry out that function so the statistics are really
going to be a very, very important tool for them in order to carry
out their function. Surely you are aware of that?
Mr Warneford: It is not for me
to comment on the level of resource but it does seem very low
for what they need to do.
Q291 Chairman: How often are your
bus fleets cleaned?
Mr Warneford: Every day.
Ms Shaw: Every day.
Q292 Chairman: Is that everybody,
every day?
Mr Wormwell: Every day.
Mr Huntley: Every day.
Q293 Chairman: Oh dear, I must have
missed those! How do you ensure that buses are generally safe
and maintained to a high standard, because we had some very interesting
evidence?
Ms Shaw: For us we have detailed
standard operating procedures which each company applies to the
maintenance of all vehicles and those include standard 28-day
routine inspections and services and then annual MOT checks, as
you would expect. Sometimes we have more frequent inspections
if the vehicle runs more mileage.
Q294 Chairman: Mr Wormwell, how
often are your vehicles inspected?
Mr Wormwell: Very regularly. We
operate to IS09000 and we have a very strict engineering regime
and we are fortunate not to have had any incidents.
Q295 Chairman: Mr Warneford?
Mr Warneford: We inspect buses
every 21 days, coaches every 14 days, and very high mileage coaches
every seven days.
Q296 Chairman: Mr Cooper?
Mr Cooper: Every 21 days and there
is also a first-use inspection every day by the driver.
Q297 Chairman: Presumably all of
you would be surprised if somebody reported to us that wheels
had come off buses in service and a number of vehicles were in
use in spite of having expired Ministry of Transport certificates,
would you? You would not find that possible given your maintenance
regimes? Mr Warneford?
Mr Warneford: I will own up, Chairman.
We have had occasionally a wheel come off one of our buses. It
is always thoroughly investigated and reported to VOSA. We had
one recently on a Scottish motorway which was a very alarming
incident which proved to be a component failure in the wheel hub
and the VOSA conclusion was that it was nothing to do with our
maintenance regime. Very, very occasionally it is down to human
failure and we have to deal with that on a disciplinary basis.
Q298 Graham Stringer: This is not
to you Mr Warneford, this is to Arriva, when Arriva had 20 buses
examined randomly, five had prohibition notices put on them and
five had delayed prohibition notices put on them. Can you explain
this if you got such good maintenance and inspection regimes?
Mr Cooper: I am sorry, I do not
recognise those numbers.
Q299 Graham Stringer: This is in
South Yorkshire, I think.
Mr Cooper: Again, I am sorry,
I do not recognise those numbers.
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