First Potteries Treatment of Drivers in Unacceptable and Will Make Building a Modern Transport System Harder. By Adam Colclough
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Last week First Potteries, the company operating public transport in Stoke-on-Trent, told its drivers, many of whom had worked throughout lockdown, that their contracts are to be changed.
First Potteries claim the changes are due to fewer passengers being likely to use busses as the country emerges from the pandemic and are necessary to ‘secure a sustainable business and protect jobs’.
The changes could see drivers lose part of their holiday entitlement and their right to a free lift home after a night shift, they will also have to take a 90-minute unpaid break during every shift.
First Potteries managing director Nigel Eggleton told the Sentinel “As we move out of the restrictions imposed by the pandemic, we like many other businesses are looking towards the future and ensuring we have a sustainable business that can secure jobs and continue to deliver a network of bus services to people in the Potteries”.
Drivers for First Potteries are represented by the UNITE trades union and Regional Organiser Stephen Blakemore told the Sentinel they were “currently engaged in constructive dialogue” with the company and were “confident that we can get a resolution that works for our members, the company and for the people of Stoke-on-Trent (our passengers)”.
Far be it from me to cast a bad spell over the negotiations at this early stage, but my experience of having any kind of ‘dialogue’ with First Potteries has seldom been anything like ‘constructive’.
Public transport in Stoke-on-Trent is, as anyone who has tried to use it will attest, a bad joke. This has very little to do with the impact of the pandemic, it was a shambles before Covid arrived; and everything to with decades of underinvestment.
I find myself in the unlikely position of agreeing with Stoke South MP Jack Brereton when he says, as he did in parliament in January 2020 “bus services are too few, too slow and too infrequent”.
The debate maunders on from there with contributions from Aaron Bell (Newcastle-under-Lyme), Karen Bradley (Staffs Moorlands) and Jo Gideon (Stoke Central) among others. Grand plans to link busses and trains, convert the busses to electric power and revamp Stoke Station to rival Grand Central in New York are floated in almost every intervention.
This is rounded off by a cheery, if lengthy, homily from Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for Transport Nusrat Ghani, about busses Ms Ghani says “we are all agreed that bus services matter. They are the best way for people to travel, being the cleanest and the cheapest, whether for getting to work or for accessing social services. We are all agreed that buses are our most vital form of public transport system”.
She might want to check that last statement, I am certain that quite a few of her fellow Tories have never been on a bus in their lives, Jacob Rees-Mogg running for the number 22 to Hanley is something I would pay to see.
Leaving stereotypes aside the real flaw in this debate and most of the conversations about public transport in Stoke-on-Trent held in parliament or the council chamber is that elected representatives have their heads in the clouds. Meanwhile First Potteries are down in the pantry paring the cheese for all they are worth.
In this instance they have decided that the pandemic is a crisis too good to waste since it allows them to engage in their favourite hobby of cutting things. Services have been cut to the bone, a process that began long before March last year, so staff terms and conditions are in the frame.
I am not sure which is worse, the predictability or the crushing myopia, either way it is a disaster for the environment and the economy of the city. Stoke is a city plagued by poor air quality, getting traffic off the roads is the best way of improving things, cutting congestion would also make the city more attractive to outside investors.
If I and pretty much anyone standing at their local bus stop can see that; why can’t First Potteries? Because nobody pushes them to do so, the city council and the MPs are too busy building castles in the air.
Building a decent, affordable, and modern transport system is fundamental to making Stoke-on-Trent into a city with vibrant economy and addressing its deep-seated social problems. To do so First need to park their outdated business practices and our elected representatives need to roll up the grand plans and focus instead on unexciting, but vital realities.
A twenty-first century public transport system is one that engages all its stakeholders equally. The council must be more than a cash cow to be ignored when it fails to fill the provider’s pail with enough in the way of subsidies and passengers must be engaged with meaningfully, ideally by giving them a stake in owning the network through something like a cooperative society.
Treating the drivers and other staff who keep the network running must be an integral part of this, if they are dissatisfied and demotivated neither this nor the grand plans debated in parliament will get off the ground. More to the point we the people who use busses in this city will be left standing at the stop for even longer.