Cornwall Council not imposing contractual penalties on Go Cornwall Bus for failures to run services
17 August 2023

Go Cornwall Bus has an 8 year contract with Cornwall Council to run bus services on those routes that are not deemed by the operator to be commercially viable, i.e. they would be loss making for the bus operator. Under the contract, the operator is paid a subsidy for running services on those routes. Within the contract, there are performance criteria and penalties are potentially payable if the operator fails to meet those criteria. For example, if the operator fails to run a service that is in the contract, the penalty is £100. See extract from contract below.

During the Covid pandemic and for a while after the ending of pandemic but whilst bus companies were still trying to recover from the adverse effects such as serious driver shortages, the Department for Transport’s advice to councils was not to impose the penalties on bus companies. However, earlier this year, the DfT withdrew that advice and I was advised by an industry source that Cornwall Council notified Go Cornwall Bus that penalties would be imposed from 1 April 2023. See earlier story.

I tried to find out whether or not penalties were actually being imposed and it has taken over 3 months to obtain an answer. Finally, on 11 August, through the FOI process, I obtained a response from the Council which said that the bus company had been informed that it was the Council’s "intention to implement performance related contractual penalties from 1 April 2023 where required and deemed appropriate”. However, the answer also said that no penalties had actually been imposed. See response below.

Go Cornwall Bus put information on their Twitter feed each day about services, including when services are being cancelled. I have recorded all those instances where service cancellations have been posted. I cannot be sure that this is the totality of all the cancellations, but it does give a good indication of the likely scale of the issue.

In the 3-months period of 6 May to 5 August, 516 services were cancelled by Go Cornwall Bus, averaging about 6 per day. See the extract from the spreadsheet detailing all the notified cancellations. If full penalties had been imposed, this would have equated to about £50,000 over the 3 months. 

It seems that Cornwall Council must have felt that it was “not appropriate” to impose those penalties. No explanation has been given for why it was not appropriate to impose any penalty in any one of the 516 examples of cancelled services.