Tower Transit shifts focus to attract bus drivers
Tower Transit runs about 650 buses in London and Cambridge with 2,000 employees and carries more than 115 million passengers a year. Photo: Tower Transit
SINGAPORE — After winning the much-coveted contract for the first package of bus routes, Tower Transit has turned its focus to making sure it delivers on its promises and plans, such as its proposal to make the bus driver occupation more attractive to groups including women, the young, and those looking to switch careers.
The United Kingdom-based company is conscious of the manpower issues in the Republic, and the general perception that people here have of bus drivers.
For the young, it has proposed a work-and-train programme under which school-leavers or those who have completed their National Service can work for their company, obtain a vehicle licence and at the same time get a qualification that they can also use if they wish to go into the logistics or shipping industry.
To draw women or those making a mid-career switch to become bus drivers, the shifts can be made more flexible, and three-day weeks or shorter work days could be introduced.
Tower Transit chairman Neil Smith said: “We believe our (proposals) will bring a lot of people into the bus industry who’ve never really considered it before, because we will be able to offer a job where compared to say, working for the retail sector, the earnings are far, far better and we’ll be able to offer shifts.”
The company will conduct a training programme here for all its staff, including the drivers, to equip them with “customer focused skills as well as technical skills”. Some employees will undergo training here as well as in Sydney.
Mr Smith said he would be glad if bus drivers who have been trained leave the company for better prospects. “We actually have a strategy of training people ... so that they move on. You have to do that in a bus company because the number of management jobs is very small compared to the number of bus captains,” he said.
“Our ambition would be that people would say, ‘If we recruit someone from Tower Transit, that person has been trained properly ... and they are an attractive employee’.”
Announcing the results of the tender yesterday (May 8), the Land Transport Authority said Tower Transit’s bid stood out due to its strict maintenance regime for bus assets and infrastructure, on-route reliability and comprehensive manpower plans.
On its maintenance regime, Tower Transit group chief executive officer Adam Leishman said the company runs a rigorous maintenance regime under which its buses are frequently serviced and maintained. The vehicles are also equipped with on-board diagnostics, he said.
Tower Transit won the contract even though its tender price, at S$556 million for five years, was not the lowest. Mr Smith said the company’s cost structure reflects what it would cost to offer a quality service reliably. “You can always do the cheapest delivery of service but if you want reliability on a bus service you need a buffer, a provision to be able to adjust when things go wrong,” he said.
While it was set up in the UK in 2013, Tower Transit is the sister company of Australia’s Transit Systems, which has been operating public bus networks in Perth, Sydney and Adelaide for over 19 years. Transit Systems has about 1,000 buses in its fleet and more than 2,100 employees.
In the UK, Tower Transit runs about 650 buses in London and Cambridge, with 2,000 employees and carries more than 115 million passengers a year.
Tower Transit’s bus drivers went on two 24-hour strikes in December last year and January, after about a fifth of them cited pay disparities and voted in favour of strike action.
Mr Leishman said the union landscape in London is very different compared to Singapore, and that the company has had some “very fruitful discussions” with the National Transport Workers Union here.
The operator requires 900 staff — out of which 700 are drivers — to run the 26 services under the first package of routes that it has won the contract for. With the services set to be rolled out by the second quarter of next year, Tower Transit is in a race against time.
“Our assumption is that many of these bus captains will be conservative and will have a bias towards staying with their existing employer,” Mr Smith said. “There is a very major recruiting task ahead of us.” ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY VALERIE KOH
