Bus driver shortage causes disruption to services across Sheffield - with 41 cancellations on one day

Bus services across Sheffield have been affected by a national driver shortage, causing many cancellations and delays, with Brexit also being raised as a factor.

On Monday October 11 alone, the Telegraph found at least 41 individual Stagecoach journeys in Sheffield did not operate due to staffing issues.

First South Yorkshire, the largest bus operator in South Yorkshire, and Stagecoach Yorkshire, say they are ‘working round the clock’ to recruit and train new staff and apologised to passengers.

“Our teams are working incredibly hard to ensure we continue to run the vast majority of our timetabled services and we remain focused on prioritising the services we know are most important for our customers", said a spokesman for Stagecoach Yorkshire.

“Issues such as Brexit and the DVLA taking longer to process bus driver licences has added to these challenges beyond our control.

“We are working round the clock to recruit people and train them in the roles that we need, and we are seeing a strong demand for jobs. “However, it takes an average of 10 weeks for a professional bus driver to be fully trained and any delays outside our control in the processing of licences means we cannot get them on the road on our network as fast as we would like.

“Where we do have to make changes to bus services, we are providing live updates to customers through social media.”

Stagecoach said it was operating 96 per cent of services. Current vacancies can be found at www.stagecoachbus.com/careers.

Rob Hughes, operations director at First South Yorkshire, said: “Like many other businesses we are experiencing a shortage of drivers and it is having an effect on some of our services across the city.

"We are recruiting new drivers and also have people in our driving school who will shortly be released into service which should assist.

"I would like to apologise to our customers who may be affected with some bus journeys that may be cancelled over this temporary period.

"We will continue to keep people up to date on what services/routes/journeys may be affected through our website.”