(06 Jul 2021, 9:55 am)Andreos1 wrote Really?
Even when you add in the associated design costs (Stenning needs to make a living too - even if the designs are copied and pasted from elsewhere or created using the automatic livery generator), fuel/plus drivers to get to and from Blackburn, raw materials and labour costs... That's just off the top of my head.
Sure there will be other numbers which need to be accounted for too.
Does make you wonder how much extra an hour per employee that budget could have funded - as you say when you add up design consultancy, up anddown to Blackburn, then even just the presumably low cost of the vinyls to change swoop into stripe - it is not going to be an insignificant sum (after all when people have suggested painting a bus for X I am sure Martijn has talked about the prohibitive cost of doing so for one vehicle never mind a fleet of hundreds). Have no idea though whether that would still transalte to just a few pence an hour per employee when it was numbercrunched. Transparency about that with the workforce might help to alleviate some of the tensions, if indeed the rebranding and repainting obesession is small fry in terms of potential money to save.
Worth noting as well that while in that video Martijn categorically states Go North East is "not making a profit" and that "none of the bus industry is making a profit yet", the preliminary year end results for Stagecoach (UK Bus operations) for 2020-21 suggests the latter statement is untrue. Page 10 of this report for anyone interested makes it clear that while massively reduced, the UK Bus division of Stagecoach actually made over £24 million operating profit in the year to May 2021. While some of this appears to be related to the Government grant funding, it is still being reported (and therefore presumably retained) as profit, contributing to share values etc.
On the flip side, a 2% payrise for any organisation (except maybe Zoom and other IT/tech companies!) in the current climate is pretty generous. The salaries quoted for drivers are comparable to the lower paid end of the NHS workforce, including some nurses - all of whome have likewise been working pretty hard through the pandemic - and are likely being rewarded with 1% rise. Not to mention the rest of the public sector...