TC not satisfied by the financial standings of Galleon Travel or Logic Travel ahead of proposed merger
Traffic Commissioner (TC) Richard Turfitt has frustrated the proposed merger of Galleon Travel and Logic Travel.
The TC has refused to increase the licence held by Rodon Harlow-based Galleon Travel 2009, trading as Trustybus, from 11 to 30 vehicles and revoking the 20 vehicle licence held by Waltham Abbey based Logic Travel Essex. In addition the TC ordered Galleon to pay a penalty of £1,100 for local service reliability problems.
Former Logic Director Giuseppi Ricotta told the TC he had had conversations with Mark Bowden of Galleon, which eventually led to Galleon taking on his coaches, drivers and the company. That encompassed ten buses, six school contracts, and a diary of work for 2012 for a price of £540,000.
Director and Transport Manager Megan Baker said that a local service was registered to Logic Travel in 2012 involving six buses. Galleon then started to do more of the private hire work from Logic.
In 2013 services started to be registered in the name of Galleon but the routes were serviced using Logic buses, and by December 2013 Logic was doing bus work and Galleon doing coach work.
In relation to a monitoring exercise involving two of Galleon’s services in February, which had shown an unsatisfactory service provision of 30%, she referred to difficulties encountered in running to time reported by drivers involving alleged obstruction by another operator.
She said that the issue had now been resolved because the other operator had gone out of business. Their own monitoring now indicated an 89% level of compliance. They had rescheduled services so as to allow extra running time. She accepted that the Galleon management team took over the running of Logic.
Ms Baker said that a bridge strike incident involving a vehicle, in Galleon livery though purportedly operated by Logic Travel, arose from a Galleon private hire booking. It was in fact a Logic vehicle, a double-decker bus with seatbelts, and which was treated habitually as part of the Logic operation.
On the day in question it was displaying a Logic disc. It should have displayed a Galleon disc and that there would have been no difficulty in that. All the work tickets now gave an instruction to drivers to check any height or width restrictions along the line of their route.
After considering financial evidence, the TC was not satisfied that either operator met the financial standing requirement but allowed Galleon a 10 week period of grace for the production of additional financial evidence.
He said that no financial evidence was produced in the name of Logic Travel. It was clear there had been such a blurring of the two operations, with the assumption of control by the Galleon Management team, that the operations were in effect treated as one.
Logic was in a weaker position than Galleon. The long-standing take over had only now been regularized, but the management team had been found lacking. There have been repeated failures to notify him of material changes.
