THE EMBATTLED boss of the coach company at the heart of the school bus fiasco has issued an apology to children and parents.

Damory Coaches’ chief Andrew Wickham used a meeting to discuss the latest report on the failures of school transport in Dorset to publicly apologise for his company’s shortcomings.

Schoolchildren were left stranded by the side of the road and several buses turned up late as they returned to school at the start of term after a shake up of the school transport system by Dorset County Council.

Damory is now responsible for 88 per cent of the school transport and acting managing director Mr Wickham told a meeting of the council’s audit and scrutiny committee that his company had to accept its share of responsibility for those failings.

He said: “I am publicly sorry to the children and to the parents for the inconvenience and distress caused when their children weren’t picked up.”

Mr Wickham added: “Children were left behind, I’m a parent myself of school age children and as a parent I completely understand the concern and anxious comments that were expressed.

“Where it was our responsibility I am deeply sorry there were children left behind.”

However, Mr Wickham urged the councillors to put the failings into context and claimed that of its 6,500 contracted journeys a week, only 1.3 per cent were affected in the first week of term and 0.8 per cent in the second week.

Director for children’s services John Nash suggested the number of journeys affected might be higher as he revealed that a survey had gone out to every school in Dorset, with 22 of the 64 schools that responded reporting that they had experienced problems.

He added that for 13 of those schools more than 50 pupils were affected.

Mr Wickham said that a number of the problems arose from drivers who had joined the firm leaving at short notice in the run-up to the contract start and due to the size of the contract and short implementation period, they were unable to find cover.

Divisional director for Damory Marc Morgan-Huws added: “We genuinely believed that at full stretch we could service the contract.”

Committee member Colin Jamieson said the council could not escape its share of blame for the failings.

He said: “I would have thought that had we conducted our project management in a proper way a lot of the issues that we are now outlining would never have materialised.”

Director for environment Miles Butler said: “The County Council must unreservedly apologise for the failures in the service at the beginning of the school term.

“It is something that is not acceptable and we must make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

The committee will now agree a list of recommendations at its next meeting on December 15.