(14 May 2014, 5:44 am)Andreos Constantopolous wrote A company the size of GNE, (with the legal team and experts in contract terms & conditions) will have studied the demands prior to signing and carried out some form of due diligence.
They will have known fine well what resources (both vehicles and staffing) were in place before agreeing to the contract and the punishments for not adhering to those terms.
If at any point they felt the company did not have the resources or felt the terms were unfair, then they could have walked away and not entered into agreement with Nexus.
Despite all of that, they signed and agreed to the terms and conditions.

Nobody held a gun to GNE's head - nor did they with any of the other operators.

I did point that out myself (albeit in fewer words) but do you not think that ensuring a vehicle has the correct minimum number of seats, correct Euro status, all that jazz, is a bit OTT? Especially when you receive a penalty when you don't abide by those conditions out of matters which are perhaps out of the company's hands? The other night we saw that an Arriva bus was operating 35 minutes late on a Nexus contract route - the service wasn't curtailed to allow the bus to make up time and passengers to largely be unaffected later in the evening. Instead, the bus kept on operating 35 minutes late and this avoided a lost mileage penalty, but the more important factor wasn't considered (the inconvenience to customers all through the night). One person even said that the timings for Nexus-secured services are 'optimistic'? Says a lot...

The folk who only have a Nexus-secured route as their only bus service wouldn't really care about a bus being Euro 5 and a bus having more than x amount of seats - assuming they got to sit down themselves...

How are smaller operators (such as Compass and GCT) expected to finance new vehicles to allow them to bid for more contracts (which are likely to have higher requirements) if they're constantly being fined >£1k every month?