Buses: Driving

(asked on 15th January 2024) - View Source

Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, with reference to the Answer of 26 October 2023 to Question 203762 on Buses: Driving, what (a) actions are required by his Department and (b) the planned timeline is for the delivery of those actions.


Answered by
Guy Opperman Portrait
Guy Opperman
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Transport)
This question was answered on 18th January 2024

The Department for Transport received requests from industry to remove the regulatory 50 km restriction on regular services for 18 – 20-year old bus and coach drivers and explore whether a person is able to undertake the theory and off-road manoeuvre elements of the Driver Certificate of Professional Competency test prior to being granted a provisional licence. The Department has been considering these requests and we are actively working on next steps.


The Department will continue to work closely with the Department for Work and Pensions and industry to identify job centre customers who would like to become bus and coach drivers and support them to achieve that aim. Part of our work on this has involved setting up a pilot scheme with an operator that is designed to recruit and train job centre customers into coach driving roles. This pilot has been successful and we are looking at rolling out a similar pilot to areas of the country that have the greatest bus and coach driver shortage.

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