Anger over Stagecoach bus services in Coventry and Warwickshire

Paul Garner said he had "taken the fight direct to Stagecoach"

A father whose son uses a bus service to and from school in Warwickshire says it is consistently late or early, or sometimes not running at all.

Paul Garner said he was fed up with Stagecoach's Coventry to Warwickshire X17 service and wanted answers as to why there were so many issues.

He said he was one of many customers to face similar problems and had struggled to get responses from the firm.

Stagecoach said it had a shortage of drivers but was addressing issues.

Mr Garner, from Warwick, said he felt the company did not seem to be aware of the problems.

Issues he said he had raised with the firm included buses driving past stops with schoolchildren waiting to be collected; school collection services being regularly late or cancelled; single-decker buses being sent that could fit everyone on; and services terminating in winter months due to a lack of drivers, leaving children stranded.

"The service is failing all over the place," he said.

"I went to social media to see if I was alone in thinking that they were isolated incidents and it clearly wasn't.

"There was such a response from a the wider community, I thought 'you know what? I've got to do something about this'.

"So I've taken the fight direct to Stagecoach, trying to relay the comments to the wider community."

'Perfect storm'

Other complaints he has encountered include services disappearing from the firm's app while en route as well as delays and cancellations.

Paul Street, from the Confederation of Passenger Transport, said there was a national shortage of drivers amounting to about 10%, which had been causing problems.

Since the pandemic, he said some drivers had left their roles and a number of EU nationals have left the UK, creating a "perfect storm" of availability of drivers, although the corner had been turned now.

In a statement, Stagecoach said it continued to operate the vast majority of services in line with its timetable but a UK-wide driver shortage was impacting some daily services and apologised to customers.

It added it was now seeing a "strong" uptake in driver vacancies through enhanced packages, but training new drivers took about three months, so agency workers were being used in the short-term.