In revoking the 15-vehicle O-Licence held by Wolverhampton-based Travel Express Ltd, ordering it to pay a financial penalty of £8,250, and cancelling all its registered bus services, Traffic Commissioner (TC) Miles Dorrington said that the company had caused an unacceptable and significant inconvenience to the travelling public.
While there would be further possible disruption caused by the cancellation of its registered bus services, it was hoped that a competent and reliable new provider would take over the routes destined to be lost and, in doing so, would allow the public to have confidence once again in any new timetables that were registered and published.
Travel Express appeared before TC Dorrington because of serious failings in vehicle maintenance and bus punctuality since November 2019.
Repeat offences
The TC said that this was the company’s fourth Public Inquiry (PI). The first two were in March 2016 and November 2017. The third was in November 2019 before then-TC Nick Denton, when it was found that there had been poor maintenance and 51% of local registered bus services had not been operated on time.
Cutting the licence from 20 vehicles and imposing a financial penalty of £6,000,TC Denton said that the same timetabling incompetence that had caused TC Nick Jones to ban sole Director Kishan Singh Chumber in 2016 from any involvement in timetabling had re-emerged since that ban was lifted in January 2019. There was some evidence that vehicles had been deliberately run a few minutes ahead of rivals, regardless of the timetable. It was difficult to reach any other conclusion than that Mr Chumber had returned to his old slipshod methods of management, timetabling, and operating. Vehicle Examiner Austin Jones gave evidence that nine of the 13 areas examined during a maintenance investigation in October 2023 were unsatisfactory.
An immediate prohibition was imposed at the fleet check for a longstanding defect of an outer nearside tyre worn below the legal limit. He looked at 207 journeys across this company’s registered bus service network on 17 days over a two-month period until 5 October 2023.
50% of the 207 journeys observed were not on time, while 61 of the 207 journeys (29.4%) observed failed to operate at all. Of the 146 journeys that did operate, 32 (21.9%) departed early and nine (6.16%) were late. 93 of the 207 journeys observed were either no-shows or early departures which equated to 45%, or nearly half, of the total number of observed journeys.
The TC said that he rejected arguments that a shortage of drivers was a reasonable excuse. That argument was used at the previous PI and as a result the company should have ensured that it had sufficient additional backup drivers available going forward to meet its peak vehicle requirement.
Problems persisted
Transport Manager (TM) Nirmal Johal confirmed that a commercial decision was made not to deal robustly with offending drivers because the company was fearful that drivers would leave if that happened. Therefore, the company knew there was a problem with early departures and, for a commercial reason, allowed, caused, or permitted that problem to persist at the expense of the travelling public.
The company could not claim, as a reasonable excuse, driver error, when it made no effective effort to correct known and unacceptable driver conduct.
The TC also considered the quite shocking fact that the company’s timetables had not been changed in any way since the PI in November 2019 right up to the date of this most recent PI. No attempt had been made to meet the ever-changing traffic and road network problems along all its registered routes.
Disqualifying Mr Johal from acting as a TM for three years, the TC said that it was to reflect not only the gravity of his failings regarding maintenance and in particular to bus punctuality, but also the inconvenience, misery and frustration he would have materially contributed to causing to the travelling public.