The boss of Bristol’s biggest bus company has appealed for more people to consider becoming bus drivers - after explaining the extent of the shortage of drivers in the city.
Doug Claringbold, the managing director of First Bus West of England, said that at some points over the past few months, staff from HGV driver agencies have been waiting outside Bristol bus station and depots trying to recruit bus drivers to switch to driving lorries instead.
He said that the company started a huge recruitment drive as bus services returned to near normal again as Covid restrictions eased, but are only now getting to the point where they are recruiting as many new drivers as they are seeing existing drivers leave.
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Mr Claringbold, who has been in charge of First in the West of England for a year now, said the challenges of recruiting and retaining bus drivers to run services in the region were a huge challenge, and the shortage of drivers has impacted on the company’s ability to make sure the advertised services run as normal.
He said the shortages of drivers in and around Bristol are the most likely reason passengers are left frustrated and waiting at bus stops - because First are struggling to fill all the buses they’ve got with drivers.
The bus company boss said the bus industry generally, and in Bristol particularly, had been hit by a perfect storm of crises - from Brexit to the pandemic and from the HGV driver crisis to the cost-of-living crisis.
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“We’re pretty much at full employment now generally in society,” he said. “With other things taken into account, in areas like ours there are more vacancies than people to fill them, and that’s a huge challenge.
“The whole HGV driver shortage last summer, autumn and into this winter had an impact on us, in terms of the number of people who were lured away from bus companies. The HGV companies were throwing money into their problem, and there’s some big numbers involved in terms of pay and packages that they were offering that we can’t possibly match or get close to,” he said.
“It isn’t an ideal situation where you are trying to keep a bus service running in a city like Bristol and you’ve got the DVLA writing to your drivers who have an HGV licence, inviting them to switch to drive lorries instead. We had people with clipboards standing outside the bus station to recruit drivers as they left work. They’d go and speak to anyone coming out, asking them if they wanted to switch,” he added.
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“It is a completely different job, however. We’ve already seen a couple of people who did switch come back because the grass is not always necessarily greener on the other side. Yes, it’s better money, but you don’t get paid breaks, you don’t get to work the shifts you might want to, you may well be out all night and don’t get to go home to your own bed every night. It’s a much harder job in many ways,” he said.
The lorry driver crisis has just been one of the reasons why First Bus has struggled to recruit and retain drivers, Mr Claringbold said.
“We’ve also experienced, like a lot of employers, that sense of ‘Covid reflection’ - what the pandemic has done has made a lot of people reassess their lives and what’s happening, so a lot of people have decided to retire early, for instance, or reconsider what’s important to them in terms of work-life balance and that sort of thing. There are a lot of factors at play,” he said.
One of those factors has been Brexit. First Bus has, in the past couple of decades, relied quite heavily on recruiting drivers from EU countries - and while many are still driving the people of Bristol around, many have left.
“We lost a fair few because of Brexit, not necessarily because of the legal side of things, but it was as much down to people perhaps not feeling as welcome living in Britain as they did, which was a shame. We did lose a number of people to that, but we had a perfect storm in the autumn of 2021, which we are still working to resolve now,” he added.
First’s recruitment drive has gone into full swing - the company even went as far as setting up a stall on the front in Weston-super-Mare, for instance, giving people on-the-spot job offers if they applied and met the criteria.
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Mr Claringbold said they were increasingly recruiting more women drivers, and people from all the many varied communities around Bristol. Driving a bus isn’t for everyone, he said, but it can be hugely rewarding.
In terms of wages, a person successfully passing through the roughly eight weeks of basic training can expect to receive a basic wage of around £25,000 - the standard hourly rate is around £12 - but with evening, night or weekend shifts that can increase substantially.
“It’s a huge amount of responsibility - it’s a skilled job. They learn to drive a bus here with us, but they learn to be a bus driver out on the roads of Bristol. There’s a lot of inter-personal skills involved too, and it can be a very rewarding career,” he said.
Out in the depot at Lawrence Hill, the first group of would-be bus drivers were getting their first experiences on a wet Monday afternoon. The group of seven included two women and came from a mixed bag of Bristol and Weston-super-Mare communities - all were switching from very different careers.
On their first day, trainer Neely Good was teaching them all the safety and equipment aspects of the buses they’ll be driving, the checks they needed to do before they start each shift, and so on.
It would be as soon as Wednesday that this group will get behind the wheel of a bus for the first time - just their third day of training. “We’ve got today and Tuesday as classroom days, and more on Wednesday morning, but by Wednesday I think this group will be able to drive a bus for the first time,” she said.
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“That will initially be just in the depot here, but it won’t be long at all before they are out on the roads. The only place you can really learn how to drive a bus is out there on the streets of Bristol. We’ll probably be going to the less-busy, wider, open roads, like the ring road for instance, rather than getting them to drive down Stapleton Road on their first go,” she added.
The group were being taught under the watchful eye of Steve Perris, who works as an official Government bus driver examiner, but is embedded at First, such is the company’s demand to get people to take their tests.
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“There’s always a few people who realise it’s probably not for them within a few days or a week or so, but usually I’d be expecting about maybe 80 per cent of any group of trainees like that to pass and become bus drivers,” he said.
Mr Claringbold said one of the key changes he’d implemented since he took over a year ago was to make the terms and conditions of bus drivers more flexible. In Bath, for instance, they have begun to trial flexible working that meant parents of school age children could - if they wanted to - only work during the school holidays.
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“We’re trialling different things, working with the unions and collectively together to see what we can do to make it better and easier to be a bus driver,” he said. “There’s always been that thing that if you’re a bus driver, here’s the shifts you’re doing and that’s that because it’s always been like that.
“But that can mean a lot of people can’t do it. We have to be creative. In a post-Covid world, that flexibility in the way people treat work has accelerated, and we’ve got to reflect that.
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“We’re making sure we’re putting a huge amount of effort into driver recruitment, and things are different now than perhaps people thought they were.
“It’s vital to us that we have enough drivers, so I’d urge everyone to think about whether this is for them. We had a lot of cancellations of services, and that’s mainly down to not having the drivers in the buses.
“One of the successes has been recruiting more women, but we’ve got a long way to go. It’s important to say that we are really trying to make First Bus the kind of place where anyone from any background feels comfortable in this space. We’re based here in Lawrence Hill in the heart of an area of Bristol with a really diverse community, and we need to reflect that as part of that community - the same with our depot in Hengrove in south Bristol too.
“This is an industry with a lot of historic baggage, and we’ve got a long way to come to overcome that, but we have made a start,” he said.
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