Mr. Andrew Edwards:

I thank the Chairman for inviting my colleague James Caffrey and me back to the committee to provide an update on the services provided by Go-Ahead Ireland. When we presented to the committee in early November, we outlined the challenges that were impacting our services such as staff shortages and traffic congestion along our routes. Prior to our appearance in November, we as an individual operator and partner to other providers in the sector recognised the challenges we faced and most importantly, the impact on our customers. We had launched and were operating a successful recruitment campaign. We had drivers in our training school and were undertaking systems improvements to enhance our services.

As part of these overall efforts, it should also be noted that we continually engaged constructively with elected local representatives, valuing their guidance regarding the challenges faced by individual customers. During our last discussion with the committee, we not only apologised for service impacts but also committed to continuing our tangible improvement efforts across all our services.

Overall, we had committed to service improvements across our network by the end of the year and I am pleased to report that we are not only meeting these targets, but also getting close to our NTA reliability target. Regarding recruitment, we continue to have strong numbers of people joining us and we are processing and interviewing between 40 and 50 applicants each week. By the end of the year, subject to paperwork coming through, we will be very close to having our target number of drivers available to drive. In addition, we will have around 70 drivers in the training school to support our attrition and get us ready for future BusConnects phases.

With regard to specific service updates, a selection of routes had been identified as experiencing issues. In line with our overall network improvements, we have seen local uplifts across our services. It should be noted, however, that certain routes still experience day-to-day disruptions, which we acknowledge and are continuously working to address.

As previously noted, prior to 2020 and throughout the pandemic, Go-Ahead Ireland consistently met the service requirements under our agreed contractual obligations. Through the hard work, dedication and commitment of all of my colleagues, whom I would I like to commend and thank for the work they do, we are addressing the issues experienced by customers over the past six months. We are focused on regaining the trust of the customer and providing the highest level of services, and this work will continue into 2023.

Looking to the future, while we are our continuing our efforts, there are external factors beyond our control that we believe committee members should be aware of in order to inform their own efforts on behalf of the public. While we have new drivers entering service on a weekly basis, the external backlog in acquiring essential paperwork for commercial drivers remains. The wait has reduced and I would like to thank the relevant agencies for their efforts. It is, however, still an issue. This means that we have drivers who are trained and fully ready to enter service but are prohibited from doing so because they do not have a specific document, which is within the system, but the physical card is not processed and posted. This is impacting Go-Ahead Ireland and many other operators across the industry, all of which face the same challenges.

Congestion has been a challenge in recent months. Our operations team actively monitors traffic conditions and is in constant contact with our driver colleagues to provide real-time updates. We have also been working closely with Dublin City Council to support traffic light priority for public transport. While we appreciate that many of these daily issues can be unpredictable, we believe that bus priority enforcement is something that should be looked at to ease overall congestion and improve safety.

As I stated, our efforts are ongoing and will continue, but we have noted a marked improvement in performance on most of our routes and an overall drop in customer contacts. In our previous discussion with the committee, we noted that some members had visited our depot to see at first hand the work of our team. I further welcome anyone who wishes to engage with us in the future.

Now that we are in a stronger position, we can look forward with confidence to making changes to our timetables towards the middle of January, and to the planned expansion of bus services as BusConnects continues to roll out. We are in the process of expanding our existing depot to cater for the many new orbital bus routes envisaged for 2023 and beyond.

We are supporting the upgrade to orbital bus services in Dublin, which is crucial to the achievement of our key sustainability and climate goals. We are also looking forward to our first electric buses, which are expected in 2024-25

While we are focused on ongoing improvement, we would ask the committee to be mindful of external factors. As such, any support to streamline the paperwork processes mentioned for new drivers would be very beneficial for us, other operators and, most importantly, the customers.

I thank the committee for the opportunity to speak here again and welcome any questions.