The new school year
Prior to a decamp to my native home to spend time with Senior Management, the annual reshuffle of buses and coaches ready for September has taken place. From September 85 vehicles will be needed to operate our college and schools contracts. PSVAR is an issue when it comes to the college work, as we charge separate fares and accept county tickets (Somerset County's post 16 student travel scheme) on these routes. We retain the fares revenue and the network relies on that revenue for it's commercial viability. A de-minimis payment from SCC covers some of the other operational costs of the network so it's marginally commercial from our point of view. The schools contracts are different, in not falling under PSVAR (in our view, we're not bringing the passengers together nor do we charge separate fares, the council does) so we don't need to operate compliant stock on those contracts. Normally we'd be using older manual gearbox Volvo B10Ms on the bulk of this work, b...