News from the BBC

Passengers tell us that London's bus network is one of the best in the world - frequent, clean, reliable and safe. But, as with most things in life, it isn't perfect.

The BBC's transport expert, Tom Edwards, illustrated this last week with some interesting reflections on the volume and nature of the complaints we receive about buses.

Complaints are really important feedback for us. We use them to identify the root causes of issues and enable us to address them where we can.

But one thing we shouldn't forget is the sheer scale of London's bus network, which is central to keeping the great metropolis of London moving and growing. This helps to put the number of complaints into context.

Buses carry some 6 million passengers a day. Last year, we carried a record 2.25 billion passengers (while, incidentally, the Underground carried a record 1.1 billion passengers).

Every complaint is, of course, important, and many people who are dissatisfied won't complain formally when they experience a poor service. But even taking that into account, 26,000 complaints over a whole year is a tiny proportion of the passengers we carry each day. So, without being complacent, we must be getting quite lot right.

The number of complaints by route also needs some explanation. Our bus routes are not of uniform size. Some are 24 hours a day, 7 days a week every few minutes in busy areas, while others run a couple of times a day on schooldays only. This is why routes like 38 and 73 feature because they are amongst the ones that carry the most passengers.

But as a percentage of passengers carried, the number of complaints is very small. It is where levels of complaint are disproportionately high relative to passenger numbers on the route that we take a particularly sharp interest in them.

We know that for every formal complaint there may be some other dissatisfied customers who didn’t put pen to paper. But we like complaints. Each and every one of them tells us about what went wrong for individuals who used our network. It would cost a fortune to learn this through research, so every single letter, email and phone call is reviewed to see what lessons might be learned.

Where there have been issues regarding staff, we do what we can to identify them and they are followed up. These days, on-board CCTV helps us understand what went on and the behaviour of staff – and passengers – is there for us to see.

I regularly review complaints and take a personal interest in investigations. There is no doubt that some passengers do not get the service to which they are entitled, and in those cases we apologise and, where appropriate, take other steps to put things right.

Many complainants provide good information (date, time, direction, even registration number of bus) so we can quickly get onto it. They are also often written to prevent a repetition in the future rather than to seek compensation. I welcome them because it helps us to take steps to improve our service to customers.

Our services are open to all and occasionally there will be a problem. I’m glad 26,000 people contacted us to tell us what they thought, even if that is a tiny fraction of the passengers we carry every day. In fact, I encourage anyone who has suffered poor service to contact us through the many available channels. It is their chance to make sure we know, and our chance to put it right.

And if that means more people are writing to us – I will be delighted! And, very soon, we will start publishing our complaints statistics across all of TfL's services - buses, Underground etc - so that all of our customers can see how we are doing.

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