Commercial and Operations Director David Astill gives Peter Jackson an insight into recent developments at NCT and retraces his career path
When people begin their careers in the bus industry, many will have long term goals in mind. Maybe it’s to become driver of the year, to open up an independent operation or to progress through the ranks in engineering. For David Astill, the aim was to secure a senior position with the city bus operator in his home town: Nottingham. Following three decades spent working his way up in various operations, he achieved this ambition a few years ago when he became NCT’s Commercial and Operations Director – a position which he’s very proud to occupy.
“My first job on the buses was 37 years ago this June; that was next door in Trent’s Manvers Street garage when they were still part of the National Bus Company,” he told me. “I took a job there as a junior traffic clerk at the age of 18, working for the National Express division. It was fine, but it made me realise that I needed to get higher qualifications if I wanted to really progress in the industry.
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“In the meantime, I worked for Nottinghamshire County Council in the public transport team, so I’d had some experience with an operator and a local authority before I went off to university in my early twenties. I spent four years at university studying transport planning and management, and came out with an honours degree and a masters. I got my MSc degree at the University of Westminster under the guidance of Professor Peter White.
“I then re-joined the industry at the end of the National Bus Company management training scheme and went to PMT, which had just gone through a management buyout. I had a really good grounding at PMT under the direction of Steve Ellis, Managing Director and Mike Frewer, Operations Director; and I still attend PMT reunions when time allows.
“Following that, I did 14 years in what became the Badgerline group and later First Group. I had various roles during that time; I was a district manager, a garage manager, Area Manager for North Staffordshire and Crewe, General Manager for Chester and the Wirral – an operation which you could trace back to the old Crosville company – and finally I was Commercial Manager for First in Staffordshire and Cheshire.
“I then took the opportunity to return to my hometown of Nottingham as Commercial Manager here in 2007. Three years ago, I was promoted to the board of directors. Time flies, doesn’t it?”
A team effort
In terms of career highlights, David recounted his experiences at Pennine Blue in the mid-1990s. “One of the most challenging things I‘ve ever done was stepping in as Managing Director of Pennine Blue when PMT bought it – just as PMT itself was selling to Badgerline,” he said. “For two years I thoroughly enjoyed operating buses around Ashton and Tameside, which was really interesting; it was a maverick bus operation set up by drivers who’d taken redundancy from GM Buses and then set up in competition with their previous employer. If it was to survive we had to find a niche for the company. It ultimately became part of the First network in Manchester. Again, I made some good friends there, particularly Peter MacCarthy who had been a founder member of the business. We still keep in touch today.”
I asked David how he benefited from having some industry experience before he started his university course. “It gives you a different perspective; I remember a tutorial where we had to debate the relationship within local authorities between politicians and officers,” he recalled. “My peers gave their thoughts on it but I’d got a bit of first hand practical experience of that, which helped. Also, deregulation was happening at that time so it was an interesting period to be studying public transport.”
Despite the varied career described above, David was thrilled to be able to return home to work at NCT. “I am a Nottingham lad and always wanted to work on the buses, so I guess where I am right now is where I always wanted to be,” he said. “But the experience I got elsewhere I feel was invaluable and, clearly, it helped me to get the senior position here. It’s all worked out rather well really!”
Speaking of that senior position, I asked David to outline exactly what it is he does on a daily basis and what the role entails. “As Commercial and Operations Director I head up that division of the business, but have a great team working with me,” he explained. “We ensure NCT delivers the service to our customers in a way that is viable and sustainable.”
“If you want to know the secret to our success, we’re a team – NCT is very much a team effort. There’s no big egos, no individuals wanting to run the show… we’re successful because we work as a team.
Investing in people
It’s clear that recognising and rewarding its staff is a top priority for NCT today. Walk around its Lower Parliament Street depot and you’ll see posters and signage proudly displaying UK Bus Awards winners, Bus Drivers of the Year and internal award winners. It hasn’t always been this way though, as David explained: “Our staff excellence awards started off as a driver recognition award, and at that stage we were testing new ground for the company. We knew we needed to recognise drivers; we were changing the culture to better deal with poor performance, so we were fully aware we needed to balance that out by better recognising and rewarding good performance.
“Our driver of the year for 2020 will be our 10th. It’s fantastic to have been able to recognise these drivers; we’ve got a display up in our reception showing all of the previous winners.
“It’s all about recognising and rewarding good performance, which is essential. We all know there was a time when perhaps the only staff that bus company bosses saw formally were those who needed corrective action. The guys who came in and did the job well day in, day out, didn’t get the recognition that they deserved – so we’re working hard to change that.
“Not so long ago, when customers had to phone in or send a letter to give feedback, they only got around to telling us about the negative stuff. One of the great benefits to social media is that people are now far more willing to tell us about the staff who are doing really well, because it’s quick and easy to do. So today we’re able to get positive feedback which previously was a rare occurrence.
“Saying that though, we invest heavily in the workforce too; we give them an incredible amount of training. Drivers now have eight weeks’ training before they go out on the road alone, and we concentrate heavily on the customer service aspect of the job. One of the key things we did 10 years ago now – and one of the first things I did when I came here – was to put drivers on shorter rotas. We’d got drivers on rotas more than 80 weeks long, which meant they wouldn’t do the same duty on the same day more than once in a year. They were also big rotas covering lots of routes.
“We felt it was important to get that rapport between customer and driver, so we split the rotas up into corridor-specific ones. Now they’re broadly based on the colours; you’re either a turquoise driver, a red driver, a blue driver etc. Our average rota length now is down to around 21 weeks, and generally we’ve got the same drivers on the same routes every day. That’s enabled us to develop that customer and driver rapport. Our customers do tell us that when they recognise their driver it gives them an assurance that they’re on the right bus! They don’t just look for the route number and colour.
“As a result of those changes we’ve seen a clear, measurable improvement in our customer satisfaction scores, and I think that a large part of what helped us be recognised at this year’s UK Bus Awards was the fact that, in our own customer surveys this year, we achieved scores in every category which were either as good or better than any we’ve managed in the last 10 years. So our internal customer satisfaction scores are at a 10-year high, our driver scores are fantastic… there’s no way we would have achieved those scores without going to the corridor-specific rotas. I believe that approach has had a huge impact.”
An evolutionary process
“I would say that the roster changes are one of the biggest alterations we’ve made since I joined which has had a huge impact,” continued David. “But we’re a company that doesn’t normally do revolution, we do evolution – it’s an evolutionary process. We’ve continued to address the network when appropriate, but I don’t like making regular changes as I strongly believe you shouldn’t change the network unless it is absolutely necessary.
“Unnecessary changes create uncertainty. If customers are used to their first bus being at 0454hrs in the morning, they want it to stay that way, never forget that customers have routines! And because we are heavily route branded, it’s important that there is stability on the network.
“Clearly, we have to respond to reliability issues – and our biggest challenge is keeping buses on time in a very congested city. But regardless, we do try to keep the network stable with early and late buses running at the same time, so people have that predictability.”
A lot has changed since David joined the company, then. I asked him to pick out the area of change he was most proud of: “The thing I’m most proud of is the change in perception of our frontline staff,” he responded. “When I joined in 2007, it wasn’t on our radar that our drivers could win national awards for customer service. I’m not criticising what the drivers were doing, I’m just saying that we probably didn’t put the emphasis on them that they deserved, so we didn’t consider it to be a possibility. It wasn’t our focus. Now here we are, 13 years on, and we have nine NCT bus drivers of the year, three of whom have been crowned Top National Bus Driver. It’s fantastic!
“Our drivers are at a disadvantage because we don’t give change and most of our customers travel with Smartcards, so the interaction time with customers is typically very brief – they don’t have long to make an impression. But it’s all about acknowledging the customer, and that just wasn’t explained to our drivers before. It used to be all about getting them on quickly and getting on your way; now it’s all about acknowledging them and thanking them when they get off the bus. That approach has paid dividends for us.”
The evolutionary process is of course very much still in full flow, as it has to be to keep up with developments in technology and the changing habits of passengers. “Our next big project is contactless EMV; Nottingham is a bit behind the curve with this,” said David. “But we’re going straight to model two, which is tap and go. That means it’ll be the same as in London where you tap-on with your bank card to use the tube and the bus. Model one will come later during 2020.
“What is the project after that one? That is the question we’re asking ourselves at the moment. Will it be electric buses? I’m not sure, they’re not quite there for the commercial operator yet. But I can’t believe the technology is far away. The question is, at what point does the public expectation that buses are low emission move to zero emission? The timescale on that is uncertain but undeniably shortening.”
Ongoing challenges
Congestion presents a constant challenge for David and his team in the Commercial and Operations division. “Our road network here in Nottingham hasn’t really changed in the last half a century,” said David. “The last major road building around the city centre was Maid Marian Way, which was constructed in the 1960s. A lot of the through traffic has been taken out of the centre of Nottingham, but where through traffic has been taken out, the carriageways have been narrowed and pavements widened, because understandably priority is being given to pedestrians in the city centre. Perhaps road traffic here isn’t growing at the levels it is elsewhere in the country, but it is still growing. And the roads around the city centre which carry the through traffic haven’t changed in the best part of 40 years.
“We’re lucky that, in Nottingham, there’s a huge political commitment to support good public transport. That’s demonstrated by the fact that the city council retains ownership of the bus company, and has invested heavily in bus priority. It has also of course invested heavily in the tram network. Traffic volumes are still growing at about 1% a year though. To put that into perspective, there are currently about one billion road vehicle miles travelled on the city of Nottingham’s road network every year. And we’re on that network, doing our best to keep to the Traffic Commissioner’s six-minute window of tolerance. It’s a massive challenge!
“Our focus is on trying to deliver the most reliable, punctual bus service that we can, because that’s fundamentally what customers want. We do significant customer research and ask them what their priorities are, and the top two are always frequency and reliability. In terms of frequency, we have more bus departures an hour per head than anywhere else outside London.
“Nottingham has a bus culture, and has had for as long as I can remember. As a boy growing up in the city I remember the zone and collar scheme, a pro-bus traffic experiment in the mid-1970s. It was about car restraint in the city centre, and was years ahead of its time. It involved dedicated Park & Ride sites using ‘Lilac Leopard’ commuter coaches for the shuttle services. So I grew up in a city which was very pro-public transport and forward thinking, as it is today. There are currently 26km of bus lanes on the radial routes into Nottingham for example, which compares favourably with any provincial city of this size.
“So we wouldn’t be so arrogant as to say that our success is just down to us – it’s the partnership approach. For example, we’re fortunate in Nottingham that the council owns the majority of the car parks, so rather than offering discounts, it is generally more expensive to park than it is to take the bus. Our Group Rider ticket is priced at £6.00 to ensure that we are cheaper on a Saturday than four hours’ parking in the city centre. So it’s more cost-effective to bring your family into town on the bus than in the car. We’re able to do that because we have a very strong line of communication with the city council.”
NCT wouldn’t be what it is today without competition though, as David explained: “Trent Barton deliver a high quality service. We openly admit that, when we set out on our course to be a better bus company in the early 2000s, our aspiration was to be as good as Trent Barton. 20 years on, I think the quality of product on the road – between Nottingham City Transport and Trent Barton – is first class.
“I think our gas buses look fantastic, but their Enviro200s look fantastic as well! So in Nottingham we have NCT, Trent Barton, a very proactive city council and a very supportive county council as well. Two high quality bus companies and pro-public transport local authorities: it’s the perfect match really, isn’t it?”
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