Strong formal warning for Fishers Tours

Alan Millar

13 January 2013

After a three-year legal saga, Dundee-based Fishers Tours has been given a strong formal warning for failing to run Scottish Express services compliantly in 2009, but will not face another public inquiry over the matter.

In her findings, Scottish traffic commissioner Joan Aitken said that inclusion of places such as Muirhead, Glasgow Airport and the Scottish Exhibition & Conference Centre as stops was a device to qualify for concessionary travel compensation and there was never a commitment to serve passengers from intermediate locations.

Nor was she satisfied that the company met the requirement to display a destination so people waiting at a bus stop knew that a local service was approaching.

She concluded that the services had been a 'sham' to collect subsidies without any real intention to comply with the timetables, and fined the company £12,650 (the maximum financial penalty she could apply for non-compliant operation at £550 per vehicle authorised on the operator’s licence).

Last October when the issue was reconsidered by the commissioner for Wales and West Midlands, Nick Jones.

He concluded that it would not be proportionate to order a fresh public inquiry, but he gave the company the ‘strongest form’ of formal warning.

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