28/07/2005 - First Bristol gets vehicle reduction- from CBW Magazine

Adopted from the article- CBW Magazine 25 July 2005.

28/07/2005 - First Bristol gets vehicle reduction
But traffic commissioner says he doesn’t want to damage the operator’s peak vehicle requirement, FIRST Bristol escaped major sanctions after more than 40% of the buses tested by VOSA showed faults (CBW, July 21).

At the second public inquiry in four years, the First Bristol fleet maintained at Muller Road was found to be in a shabby state, with 11 of 46 vehicles tested getting an immediate prohibition. There was no effective driver defect reporting system, and in one case, a fault had been marked as rectified when it still existed.

But traffic commissioner Philip Brown decided to make a reduction in the company’s licence from 350 to 300 at the end of January next year, unless an inspection in November is satisfactory, in which case the licence will be reduced by just 25 vehicles: “If I am able to make that latter variation, the operator’s peak vehicle requirement will not be affected,” said Mr Brown.

However, the traffic commissioner did hint that, if management didn’t improve he wouldn’t hesitate to remove its licence: “…it may find the question ‘Does this operator deserve to be put out of business?’ [in the context of Brian Haulage Ltd Transport Tribunal] being answered in the affirmative,” said Mr Brown.

First Bristol said it had resolved the problems after the November 2004 inspection, and that the traffic commissioner hadn’t found against the transport manager or themselves: “We are confident that the robust action we have taken…has improved our maintenance and engineering across the company,” said MD Alex Perry. “We have a completely new management team at Muller Road Depot.”

*  Immediately after issuing the statement, Mr Perry also announced that he is to leave First after his three-year stint to become a project director with National Express-owned Central Trains.

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My opinion:-

IF First Bristol reduce its operator license to 300 vehicles, a number of route is going to be run by other operator with immediate effect. At the moment First Bristol has 350 buses and from which, 27 of them are spares. After the reduction of 25 buses in November, First Bristol will only have 2 buses for spares to support the other 323 vehicles. I hope the maintenance standard of FB would do better otherwise we will suffer from shortage of vehicles soon.

PS: First is going to advertise Alex Perry's post after his resignation in November, shall I go for it??#