In ordering Potters Bar-based Sullivan Buses Engineering to pay a £1,000 penalty for failing to operator local bus services in accordance with its registered timetable, Deputy Traffic Commissioner (DTC) Nick Denton has required that the money be used to compensate passengers on Borehamwood to Watford service 306.
Evidence was given at a Cambridge Public Inquiry (PI) that the company achieved only a 65% compliance rate over seven days’ monitoring by DVSA of three of its routes during late 2024.
An updated report presented by the company covering one of those routes between 1 February to 23 May showed that compliance remained broadly the same.
It presented cogent arguments why it was impossible to achieve anything like the 95% compliance rate expected by the Senior Traffic Commissioner, or indeed the 90% aimed for under the partnership with Hertfordshire County Council.
Primary among those is extreme traffic variability in traffic conditions caused by proximity to the M25, A1(M) and ‘bottleneck’ junctions. DTC Denton said that in the main, he had much sympathy for the operational challenges in that environment.
However, he noted from the report of DVSA Traffic Examiner Tori Duggan that the response to a significant number of complaints about one service was that three of the vehicles dedicated to that route had been off the road since September 2024 because of collisions caused by third parties.
Mr Denton observed that the company continued to use this explanation in May 2025, eight months later. The company said it had initially hoped for the vehicles to return to service fairly quickly but subsequently found it difficult to obtain some parts for models out of production.
The company accepted that it should have managed things differently, such as hiring vehicles. Instead, it invested in engineering resource for the necessary repairs. One of the vehicles remained out of service at the time of the PI. The others re-entered service around six weeks before.
Mr Denton recognised that the company could not have predicted how long returning the three vehicles to service would take.
However, it should have realised much earlier that repairs would not be quick and that action to plug the gap was needed, either by bringing in vehicles on a temporary basis or amending the timetable to reflect the reduced fleet at its disposal.
The company did neither; the result was that passengers suffered substandard service, the causes of which were nothing to do with local traffic conditions but were within the company’s control.
DTC Denton imposed a penalty of £40 per vehicle. The company is currently authorised 25 vehicles for a total penalty of £1,000.
He said that where passengers suffered sustained poor performance and an operator was failing to take prompt and appropriate remedial action, it might be beneficial to order compensation to those passengers. Mr Denton considered that those criteria had been met in the case of service 306.
