In the three short years it has been operating, Northants community transport operator Ability has touched the lives of many elderly and disabled individuals, giving them new-found independence. Peter Jackson spoke to the company’s co-founder to get the full story
“My background has always been in transport and logistics, predominantly in engineering. I started on the tools before moving into management and holding various roles, from running truck dealerships through to outsourcing and contract work. I’d not done a lot in the bus industry, however,” Nigel Hinch told me. Despite that last fact, he’s now the co-founder and CEO of his own community transport operation, Ability.
He went on to explain how he got involved in the sector: “When I took early retirement due to ill health, I became a trustee of a community transport scheme locally. During my involvement in that organisation, I became aware of a neighbouring area in South Northamptonshire that had no community transport scheme. My wife and I looked into it, researching funding and working out if we could operate something ourselves. At the time, the rural areas were being hard hit by the withdrawal of bus subsidies, as the main commercial operators couldn’t make those routes pay. We thought we could run something that was not-for-profit and reliant – to begin with at least – on volunteers, although we’ve since moved to employed status.
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“We launched the company in 2018, with myself doing the driving and my wife handling the bookings. It became quite clear that the demand for this type of service was really high across some of the rural areas. We could get 15 people on our bus and drive past a double-decker in the same area with limited numbers on it,” he said. “We’d gone down the route of flexible registration, which has allowed us to go directly from pick up to drop off without following a fixed route. To make the routes pay, a lot of the commercial operators – when you get to the outskirts of an urban area – end up plotting routes based on where they think they’ll be able to pick up passengers stood at bus stops. But the clients we’ve got are relieved we don’t do that, as they get sick of being driven around housing estates for no reason! There’s often nobody to pick up – people don’t generally want buses in those areas at 1100hrs. We ask our customers where they want dropping off, and because we use minibuses, we can get inside supermarket car parks to drop people off right by the door. All of a sudden, for people with mobility issues, life becomes a lot easier, because we can offer a door-to-door service.”
Above and beyond
Ability’s choice to adopt a flexible route model means that people have to pre-book at least a day in advance to give the operator time to optimise the journey using the Flexiroute management system.
There’s also a social benefit to pre-booking, as Nigel highlighted: “We know who we’re meant to be picking up. If Mrs Smith isn’t at the pickup point that was agreed at the appointed time, our office is made aware and will then either try to contact the customer or one of their family members. We’ve had a couple of instances where people have had issues – particularly with the onset of dementia – remembering what time and place they’ve booked their journey for. Sometimes, we have to get the police to come out and check on them, and usually it’s just a case of them forgetting the time of their booking. For the families, it’s helpful knowing that level of service is there in case anything does go wrong. We’re allowing people to live independently in their own home, and taking them shopping once a week is probably the highlight of the week for many of them. In the commercial world, what we do would be classed as exceptional customer service, but for us it’s just part of the day job. There are other things that we have to do differently, too. When people ring up to make a booking, quite often they want to have a chat with somebody – just like they want to have a chat with the driver when they get on and off the bus. For some people in the rural areas, these interactions are the only ones they’ll have each week, so maintaining these relationships is a very important part of what we do.”
Ability offers three levels of membership. The entry-level Bronze membership is free for concessionary pass holders, who will be picked up from bus stops if they choose this option. “Because of the mobility issues some of our passengers have, we introduced the Silver membership,” Nigel said. “One of the benefits of that is that we can pick them up closer to home, wherever’s most convenient along the route we’re taking. The Gold level of membership is a full-blown door-to-door service, with the driver also carrying the passenger’s shopping to the front door if needs be.”
Covid challenges
I mentioned to Nigel that it must have been extremely tough to balance the wellbeing of his passengers with their need to maintain social contact during Covid, particularly in the early days of lockdown one. “Yes, Covid came along very quickly with the first lockdown,” he replied. “A lot of families started advising their older relatives, friends or parents not to go out. We had an interesting incident at Asda where a passenger bumped into her daughter, who’d told her not to go out. This lady wanted to go out though, so they ended up having a barney and she came back on the bus and said, ‘I’ve just been put in my place, I’m not allowed to go out and play anymore!’
“You get this role reversal in life don’t you, when your parents get to a certain age and you’re doing more for them and caring for them more than they are for you. A lot of passengers said to us they’d been told they couldn’t go out. We did keep running some of the buses; there were certain people who could not survive, because they had no support network around them. We did that very much on a one-on-one basis. We also launched an initiative which we nicknamed KIT – Keeping in Touch. We sent postcards to everybody, wrote letters and updated people on what was happening. We were a fledgeling business really at that time, and we wanted to make sure we retained our customer base as much as we could.”
Ability also did a stint delivering food parcels around Northamptonshire, dropping off around 300 parcels each week to vulnerable people during the height of the crisis. When they went back to carrying passengers after the first lockdown, the firm’s drivers continued to deliver food parcels to those who had to self-isolate – an initiative that made a real difference. “That really went down well, because a lot of these people had decided that it wasn’t safe to go out and were then faced with having no food,” said Nigel. “A lot of our passengers have been through the War so are used to getting on and looking after themselves, and probably wouldn’t want to bother a next-door neighbour by asking for help.”
Latterly, Nigel reports seeing a noticeable increase in passengers as most have had both of their vaccines. “A retirement village we work with refers to their clients as recycled teenagers, because once they’re out you just don’t know what they’re going to get up to!” he joked. “We still aren’t able to use the full capacity of our buses at the moment, which would ordinarily be between 12 and 16 passengers depending on the vehicle. The rear two seats in some of them are removeable, as we have to store everything from shopping trolleys to walking frames and of course all of the shopping our passengers are buying. During lockdown, friends and family were doing the shopping for a lot of our passengers, but that has really annoyed a lot of them; they never get the right things or buy things that they would never eat, and they don’t go to the right shops. And to them, that once-a-week trip to the supermarket with a group of friends on the bus is a grand day out.”
Making memories
Ability offers its customers actual days out, too, which have proven popular. “One of the other things we do is relatively local trips. It could be a luncheon club, an out-of-town retail park… garden centres are firm favourites at this time of year too,” Nigel said. “All we’re doing here is connecting people with places, which is one of the straplines we use and it really does sum it up. They can go to a garden centre and have a mosey round and go in the café, integrating with others. The great thing is that when you get a regular route running, the passengers get to know each other and look out for each other. We had six people we took to Tesco every week forming a Costa Committee club! They would go and do their shopping and had an hour to spare, so they ended up forming a friendship. They’re all from different walks of life, have different interests and everything, but they religiously get together every Thursday at Costa.”
Nigel previously had a request from half a dozen passengers to take them to Banbury on Monday afternoons for a local dance class they belonged to – so he scheduled a service just for that. Other passengers use it too, some getting off earlier to do their shopping. “It’s all community, it’s a community bus service through and through,” stated Nigel, understandably proud of what Ability has become. “We sometimes refer to it as a ‘social club on wheels.’”
Ability also organises group travel for local charitable organisations like Deafconnect. “It’s great fun taking them out – all you can hear is laughter in the background but you don’t know what made them all laugh!” said Nigel. “They’re signing jokes and comments to each other in silence and then, all of a sudden, they’ll burst out laughing! It definitely takes some getting used to when you’re driving.”
More recently, the operator began working with West Midlands Trains on a pilot for a potential new service. Nigel explained that there’s always been demand amongst his customers for group travel to destinations like the NEC, particularly for events like Crufts. Ordinarily, this would mean driving the group all the way there from Northampton, paying for a parking space in Brum and the driver sitting around waiting all day for the dog show to finish up.
Instead, Nigel and his team thought it’d be better to drive the group to Northampton train station rather making the trek west, freeing up the vehicle for the day. Meanwhile, both Birmingham and Northampton railway stations ensure there are people on-hand to help Ability’s passengers with access – deploying ramps if needed – and guide them through the station.
“The feedback was amazing,” said Nigel. “Our passengers were saying ‘it’s been years since I’ve been on a train,’ but because it was all laid out for them, they were quite comfortable to do it. We’re now looking at what else we can do using the West Coast Mainline; there are a lot of possible destinations and trips we have in mind. One of our recent Sprinters has been specified with USB charging points to suit commuter traffic. We’re looking at how we can get commuters to the train station, helping to take cars off the road. It’s very much at the early stages at the moment, but it would fill the beginning and end of each day for us – at the moment we’re only really doing the middle. We can’t run before 0930hrs for concessionary pass holders in Northamptonshire.”
German engineering
“We operate an all-Sprinter fleet bar one small Volkswagen Caddy, which is our wheelchair accessible vehicle,” said Nigel. “It’s finished in black, and it has a ramp at the back for wheelchair access. We’d been doing some work on getting people with mobility problems to funerals, and approached a number of funeral directors about supplying an accessible vehicle. It would save them time and be more convenient for families. So that’s why we bought the Caddy; we haven’t been able to launch the service yet due to Covid, but it also allows us to transport wheelchair users for other purposes too. We have five Mercedes-Benz Sprinters on the fleet: two white ones which are a little bit older and three silver ones. We acquired our first new one from EVM last year, which has an electric side door. Sprinter number six is currently waiting at EVM to be delivered, and will be coming into service soon. The two white Sprinters are Mercedes-Benz factory minibuses, and are ex-NHS blood transfusion vehicles. They came with air-conditioning in the rear, which was just an absolute boon in the early days. One of our silver Sprinters is also a factory minibus, and the other two are EVM conversions.”
