THE boss of Morebus has told how the company moved rapidly to replace Yellow Buses services after the biggest collapse of a bus operator for more than 30 years.
A process that would normally take months was telescoped into barely 48 hours after administrators announced Yellow Buses would stop operating.
The last Yellow Buses ran on Thursday, August 4. Morebus had vehicles running on almost all the Yellows’ routes, with more than 70 of its former rival’s staff behind the wheels, on Saturday.
Morebus managing director Andrew Wickham said: “The thing that made this happen is the brilliant, fantastic group of people that work for us.
“Before a week ago, I had said we had the best people of any bus company in the country at all levels – drivers, cleaners, managers, the lot. Events of the last seven days have absolutely underlined that.”
Yellow Buses had only been in administration for days when it was announced that there would be no rescue of its core bus business.
“I’ve worked in the bus industry for 35 years and it’s sad to see a long-standing operator fail,” said Mr Wickham.
“I think I’m right in saying this is the largest bus company to fail since 1990.”
Morebus made a swift decision to replace the Yellows’ services, running with the same route numbers.
“When Transport for London tenders a route out – and some of them are on a similar scale – that mobilisation is about nine months. We did it in two days,” he said.
The first challenge was finding enough buses. “We always keep a small reserve fleet in case of things going wrong but we’ve never kept around 40 buses spare,” he said.
Fortunately, the company’s contract with Bournemouth University requires it to replace the vehicles on routes to the campus every five years. Those five years are up in September and replacements had been ordered, giving it about 15 extra vehicles.
Operators had been asked by government to keep school children separate from general passengers at the height of the pandemic, so Morebus had added more buses for that purpose. Other vehicles were drafted in from other businesses in the group.
More room was also needed. There was “not much space” in Poole, but the company had opened a Bournemouth depot in 2019 which could squeeze in more buses.
The next step was to hire drivers, with successful applicants from Yellow Buses given a £3,000 welcome bonus.
A recruitment event at the Village Hotel on Castle Lane East saw Yellow Buses drivers interviewed and their paperwork checked. Decisions were issued quickly and successful candidates were given an induction session and notice of their work pattern.
“We had 70 people out on the road on Saturday that we recruited on Friday. It was a mass mobilisation effort,” said Mr Wickham.
The official process of registering Morebus as the operator of the routes was hurried through with the help of BCP Council and the “pragmatic” approach of West of England traffic commissioner Kevin Rooney.
Informing the public was another challenge, with real-time information boards updated with the replacement services.
“I would like to put on the record how helpful BCP Council was on all of this,” said Mr Wickham.
Physical timetables were put out at 400 bus stops in one day and leaflets were put on buses for handing out to passengers.
“There are many bus operators that don’t bother with roadside information at all. They tell you to visit a website,” said Mr Wickham.
“We understand that some people like to get their information from a website, some people like to get it from an app, some people like to get it from the side of the road and some people like to get it from a leaflet. Our policy is to provide all of those and we did it all on that Friday.”
Morebus managing director Andrew Wickham
He said the company had been able to move quickly because its owner, the Go-Ahead group, allows its subsidiaries plenty of autonomy.
“We can operate in a far more agile way, just getting on with things and not having to get approval for everything we do from someone else,” he said.
“We’re trusted to make the correct decisions within Go-Ahead.”
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