As predicted the other day, a swift ending to registered operations, saving him a few £ in fuel and driver wages. There are such things as driver agencies, but that'll cost £. He has done this before with Gardbus - closed before the registration period is up.
He's been here before with the sudden ending of Gardbus. That time he was allowed to surrender his licence.
The collapse of Minilink continues in typical Gard fashion. No service this weekend on 13A.
Simon Gard has now put WA54JWC and WA54JWD up for sale on via their personal Facebook page. I'm assuming these two will be the final SML buses to go. I'm still convinced we'll see him back operating some unviable route in and around Southampton in the near future.
Why the traffic commissioner fails to intervene and ban him from running registered local bus services defeats me. The normal rules of operation, especially notice periods when deregistering have long been optional as far as Simon is concerned. He would make as much, if not more from sticking to railway work and it is easier to resource and a known quantity when it comes to revenue - if the bus isn't paid for it doesn't move etc.
Simply because our TCs are spineless and would rather sit in the office doing nothing rather than doing the job that they are paid silly amounts of money to do.
I like how they will chase those operators but not chase the operators who run normal public services and don't comply.
Has been required since earlier this year.
The advert says he’ll consider a part ex with a 16 seater minibus
Certain local authorities such as Devon seem much more pro active in supplying investigation to the TC than others. You’ll note theres regularly Devon based operators up in front for failing to operate registered services
Devon's tender requirements are a little more stringent than other local authorities. As Gard is operating under Hampshire I'm surprised they're not forwarding evidence to the TC's office. Hampshire always was one of the more switched on authorities. Given the past poor compliance history of this operator, the stopping services before registration period would be uncovered by a monitoring exercise. He'll be saving the fuel costs (which will run to a four figure sum) of running empty buses, thus gaining competitive advantage over compliant operators in the area.
Interesting. I wonder why that changed.
Operators can put notes on the timetables and can put in 'not for public use' on BODs too. It's rarely used but it is possible somewhere. NXWM buses for example, they have 'not for public use' on their description but their actual BODS entry for the route show the "<PublicUse>true</PublicUse>" which means that the public can use the bus.
He must've had a special relationship with LinkRider, as he hired that vehicle for a short while in March of this year.
It is still owned by Trevor Shore. It was never owned by Dekkabus or Minilink, it was just made available to hire via the companies via Trevor's involvement.
Good to see. Thanks for update. There has been such a lot of churn from the various fleets, it was hard to work out who owned what
There's been massive staff turnover in other parts of Hampshire County Council, so I wouldn't be surprised if that hadn't affected transport too.
