It’s ‘Catch the Bus Month’ so I hopped on board Superloop with someone who has been championing bus users for the past 12 years
Myself and Claire Walters during our pleasant Superloop journey
“The bus should be like a referee – you shouldn’t notice it; everything should go smoothly. It should only be noticed when something goes spectacularly well or wrong. The bus is something that lets you live your life independently.”
So says Claire Walters, CEO of Bus Users UK, who is spending a month celebrating the joys of bus travel, organising over 100 events across the length and breadth of the country, and very well too – without a penny of funding!
As part of the frivolity, thrills and spills of September’s ‘Catch the Bus Month’, I caught up with Claire towards the end of her quest to do a full orbit of London’s Superloop network. We travelled from Heathrow to Teddington on a bus with great customer service – nice and clean too, slick, reliable and so quick that we had to find a pub for a coffee and coke in order to have enough time to catch up on her interesting career exploits and views.
Claire is 12 years into her stint at Bus Users UK and will go out on a high around a year from now, retiring at the climax of the 2025 Catch the Bus Month which will be the biggest, “most whopping ever”, also marking the 50th anniversary of Bus Users UK. The organisation has changed quite a bit, and not just in having moved away from its office right opposite my bedroom window in Shepperton. Today it is more than ever before heavily involved in all manner of strategic alliances, from BSIPs (Bus Service Improvement Partnerships) to those bringing together bus, coach, bike and train.
The Bus User’s UK supremo has had an interesting career. “Let’s just say eclectic, Alex,” explains Claire, before, as you do, hurriedly revealing that she has done all sorts from chalet girl to a consultant working in central eastern Europe in the early 1990s, being shot at, arrested and crossing closed borders in the middle of the night. It would take us a couple of spins of the entire Superloop to get to the bottom of that, not just Heathrow to Teddington, so I canter along and discover that prior to joining Bus Users UK she was running a credit union in East London but needed more employment stability and went for the job, but only after it was readvertised. She recalls: “I didn’t go for it first time round as I thought, ‘why would they want me?’”
Shocked at landing the hottest job in Shepperton, Claire soon realised actually she had the right skillset: “In my credit union role, I was doing a lot of re-organisation work and so too in charity consultancy for 17 years before – finding out weak points in businesses and addressing them, so there was quite a bit of synergy actually.”
I remember Claire joining the industry at the time and I always thought she came across as a bit fearsome, like the headmistress you wouldn’t mess with. It can’t have been easy on reflection, a female in a predominantly male industry, championing the needs of customers.
“When I was at the Credit Union, I was a white minority but here [in the bus sector] everybody was male, white, age 55,” Claire recalls. “Yet, when you look at those driving the buses, that’s not the case – there was and still is, albeit to a slightly lesser extent, a distinction between the boardroom and front of the bus.
“Part of the problem is that we’re not engaging with the communities enough – drivers are drawn from these communities, and more women use buses than men, but it is still a very male orientated sector.
What isn’t diverse is the planning and people in charge. There needs to be active engagement. Hoping non-white people and women will come along isn’t going to move things forward
“What isn’t diverse is the planning and people in charge. There needs to be active engagement. Hoping non-white people and women will come along isn’t going to move things forward. You have to work to make it happen. It’s changed a bit but there’s lots of work to be done – though that’s not my job – my job is to look after the interests of passengers.”
I probe a bit more: “You are definitely a bit fearsome and larger than life, it can’t have been easy.” To which Claire replies: “Look, I do have the odd diplomatic bone in my body. The vast majority of people in the bus industry take pride in providing a service to people. If you are pointing out it could be better and how, then that’s the best approach.
We try and come up with solutions and work pro-actively with operators. We don’t come out to beat people over the head, we are collaborators really
“We try and come up with solutions and work pro-actively with operators. We don’t come out to beat people over the head, we are collaborators really. We work in partnership with operators and if they have a problem they can come to us and discuss it in confidence.
“We have expanded our influence into quite a lot of areas – enhanced partnerships, franchises – we’re involved with local authorities. We work with other organisations on sustainable transport. When I first came in, the people who supported cycling projects or rail wouldn’t talk to bus people. It’s still not always the case now in terms of operators of different modes getting round the table, despite our best efforts. However, in terms of the organisations that promote them, we’ve formed a sustainable travel alliance.”
I ask Claire what she thinks has been the biggest improvement in the bus sector since she joined in 2012. She says she can see there has been a gradual shift in the approach towards driver recruitment and was struck in the early days by James Freeman’s then revolutionary stance of saying as Reading Buses CEO that he wouldn’t take on ‘bus people’ but retail folk. James used to say: “I can teach anyone to drive a bus but I can’t teach them how to be good at customer service.”
James, who always championed the role of bus drivers himself, is now driving buses for Stagecoach in Winchester, having joined the industry a year after Bus Users UK was created – a better role model you couldn’t find. Claire is concerned that a lot of those at the top in the bus industry are new to the sector and this has caused a disconnect.
Most customers won’t give a stuff about branding – I know Ray Stenning will hate me for saying that. Passengers want a bus to take them where they want to go as swiftly, affordably and as accessibly as possible
“They’re always looking at a premium offer, price and looking flash,” she explains. “Most customers won’t give a stuff about branding – I know Ray Stenning will hate me for saying that. Passengers want a bus to take them where they want to go as swiftly, affordably and as accessibly as possible.”
I buck up the courage to joust back: “But won’t branding make them aware of buses?”
She just replies cooly, raised eyebrows: “That’s the concept? Is it true? Does anyone ask them? Look Alex, Manchester spent a fortune on yellow paint, but haven’t sorted the buses out yet. They are doing it step by step but it’s confusing the hell out of people”.
Franchising is a thorny issue for Claire, but not because she doesn’t believe in it, she’s pretty ambivalent: “I’m like passengers in that I don’t really care, most think it’s still run by the council anyway. I come back to that referee analogy about a good bus service being one that isn’t noticed.”
Claire is more worried about “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”, particularly for instance in somewhere like the West Midlands, where the bus proposition has traditionally been very good.
“Our latest report for experiences of disabled people shows how important it is to live an uninterrupted life and the buses are the main driver of this. We can’t tamper with those places where the product is strong. One concern with franchising is there isn’t enough money set aside for it and if you are going to do it well, with all that money going to well-meaning consultants – and a lot of them don’t have transport experience and are not talking to us or to passengers … I’m concerned we will throw baby out with the bathwater if we’re not careful.”
As someone who owns a consultancy that has been involved in advising on franchising and other strategic matters for the bus industry, I’m bristling now, but in truth Claire has a point.
If Claire is worried about franchising, she’s more vexed by the general lack of understanding by bus companies about how vulnerable people feel late at night.
We get so many horror stories of a lone young adult or teenager on a bus and then something happens that means the bus has to stop or go a different way and if they don’t announce that … Really the industry should be doing better
She remarks: “We get so many horror stories of a lone young adult or teenager on a bus and then something happens that means the bus has to stop or go a different way and if they don’t announce that … Really the industry should be doing better. It’s not just a young teenager, even a 25-year old or anyone for that matter can get anxious in a strange place with no idea how to get home. It’s pretty scary.”
Onto calmer matters and I ask Claire about the future of Bus Users UK, particularly with all this structural change in the sector. It’s a charity, so trustees determine what happens going forward and ‘the government has no say’.
“We’re independent and there to support passengers, so unless you invent some Star Trek teleporting scenario, then passengers will also be there and need someone to help them,” she says. “We’re currently involved with local authorities and see both sides of the fence, we are a statutory consultee on lots of things.”
I discover that Bus Users UK gets no more funding from the government than it did in 2013. “We deliberately don’t rely on one source of funding,” Claire tells me. “We get some from the industry, some funds are raised as a charity, local authority contributions as well – it’s a mish-mash.”
Away from Bus Users UK, Claire is the Cabinet Office-appointed disability and access ambassador for bus and coach and chair of various enhanced partnerships, alliance and BSIP boards. She’s not quite got as many roles as Greggs the Bakers, but Claire has certainly got her hands full. It’s clear buses are in her blood belying, by comparison with many industry old-stagers, the relative recency of her working in the sector. She talks to me about the highlight of her Superloop sojourn being spending time with Roger French on the bus from Walthamstow to North Greenwich, “even if the journey went a bit Pete Tong, as the driver didn’t understand there were other superloops and just kept trying to send us back to Walthamstow”.
Claire and Roger aren’t dissimilar; she enjoys travelling around on buses for fun and living in my old stomping ground near Bromley we spend a few minutes discussing her favourite bus route – the 261 to Bromley town centre and Lewisham. She understands the rationale behind my Great Scenic Journeys venture and she speaks eloquently about her love of the 246 which is “most interesting for a half day out – planes on the runway at Biggin Hill, which is a place small enough to be cute, a quite nice pond in Keston, greenery and forestry”.
Time is pressing, she’s got another Superloop to get on, hopefully avoiding the traffic in Kingston, but not before we’ve looped full circle in our chat and she takes a picture of me holding, Kenny Everitt style, the very big foam hands that are now synonymous with Catch the Bus Month. Chalet girl to Catch the Bus champion, it’s been quite the career for Claire – and brace yourselves, because I suspect the remaining 12 months are going to be more entertaining than ever. There’s no way she will go quietly, which is great news for passengers.
Claire will certainly leave a super legacy and one can only wonder about the even bigger mark she’d have made on the bus industry had she not discovered it towards the denouement of her fascinatingly eclectic working life. We should let the bus be the ref on how things might have panned out.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Alex Warner has over 30 years’ experience in the transport sector, having held senior roles on a multi-modal basis across the sector. He is co-founder of recruitment business Lost Group and transport consultancy AJW Experience Group (which includes Great Scenic Journeys). He is also chair of West Midlands Grand Rail Collaboration and chair of Surrey FA.
This story appears inside the latest issue of Passenger Transport.
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The post Catching the bus with Claire Walters first appeared on Passenger Transport.