Apparently St. Helens isn't going to be electrified yet they all might end up at Gillmoss. It's possible St. Helens will get more up to date diesels in September 2026
Honestly I bet St. Helens will get the poor treatment as per usual. 2nd hand diesel buses that's ran loads of miles already...
If you look at it from a perspective of capacity vs seat utilisation, while the 10A may be very busy, there can often be seats free, and there are often other routes available which run around the same times and places as the 10A, also with spare seats. It's a similar thought process to what London does. If 4 buses run 60% full and you remove one bus, if all the same passengers travel, then each remaining bus becomes 80% full.
When there is news, it will be shared. There will be lots of singing and dancing from the City Region as well as likely some kind of formal announcements by the operators.
At the Firstgroup half year results announcement the Chief Executive in the question and answer session said that he was expecting an announcement fairly soon.
I believe the operators will be informed tomorrow from what I have been told, however it may not be made public until at least 10 days after....
Standard public sector procurement stuff - you must have a 10 day standstill period between award notification to all bidders, and any release into the public domain. This is to allow any appeals to be registered.
Is this 10 calendar days or 10 working days? In that there are two bank holidays in the next 10 calendar days (and 3 in the next 10 working days (even taking Saturday as a working day)) which could knock a bit of a hole in time for anyone to kick up.
You reckon he would have made a big effort in bidding for both Birkenhead and St Helens garage?
He personally won't have made a big effort in it. But the overall First Group will have done. They bid for everything normally.
It was 10 calendar days - from the 2015 Public Contract Regs...
...but the 2023 regs now specify 8 working days which they state equates to 10 calendar days to account for public holidays (but not Sat and Sun).
For them, it will be an opportunity to grow the business and will be part of the group's bid unit which was headed up by Phil Stockley IIRC. However, they've enjoyed limited success so far with Bee Network; will be interesting to see what happens as it's Arriva with most to lose.
Thanks.
As has been said before, it DIDN'T leak out in tranches 1 and 2. I suggest that organisations might be very keen to ensure that they aren't the source of a leak... wouldn't be a great look to break your NDA.
I reckon so as well, there will be someone on the inside who knows it all could leak some information
Alot of the chatter during the Bee Network were well educated guesses...
We didn't get any clues with Bee Network T1 or T2, nor the schools packages. It was just T3. We will get speculation and rumour...and someone will be right (almost by law of averages), backing up @Leyland Bus's comments that there will be some educated guesses. We tend only to remember the ones that were right, not the ones that weren't...
All we know right now is that around 15 or 20 companies have made bids and the winner(s) will not be announced until after New Year
That seems a high amount of bidders?
It's from what I heard. FirstGroup, Stagecoach, Rotala, Transdev, Go Ahead group, Metroline, Tower Transit are bound to be amongst the bidders. Arriva will probably be on there as well to retain the Birkenhead and St. Helens depots.
TBH, it's not the only instance. IIRC, when First Group were looking to reduce their debt pile c.2013 by having a rights issue and disposing of operations, the ill-informed speculation was off the scale. I lost count the number of times that York or Livingston depots were to be sold and to whom. As I alluded to before, there is so much speculation with this (and Manchester) that at some point, some person will be right just from the law of averages (i.e. if you fire the shotgun enough times, you'll eventually hit something).
If its public, what's the document this is from, id like to give it a read
That is a downgrade itself for the 10A. At the moment it's normally every 6 minutes for the 10A
