Major revamp for NBC
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• The six operating regions of the National Bus Company are to be merged into three from April 1 as part of a major reorganization of management structure. And the express services and tours operations of NBC are to be made divisions of a new Central Activities Group.
The NBC's new chief executive, Mr S. J. B. Skyrme, said on Tuesday that the aim was to simplify the company's structure and reduce the number of people reporting to a single executive. He said he believed the new structure would give the regions greater powers of decision, while the centralized coaching control would provide a new national marketing and planning basis.
The three regions — Eastern, Southern and Western — will each contain between 6000 and 7000 stage carriage vehicles and will each have a regional director, supported by a regional executive. Between the company general managers and the regional -director will be chief general managers, yet to be appointed, who will each oversee a group of companies. The three regional directors will report direct to the NBC's chief executive, as will the director of the new central activities group (Mr David Glassborow, at present director of planning and development).
The Eastern Region, an amalgamation of the present Eastern and North Eastern Regions, will have as its director Mr G. M. Newberry, his regional executive being Mr J. Niblock.
The Southern Region (south of a line from the Severn to the Thames, and including Bristol but not Oxford), will have Mr F. K. Pointon as director, with Mr D. S. Deacon as his executive. Also reporting to Mr Pointon will be Mr C. R. Buckley, as managing director of London Country Bus Services Ltd.
Mr G. Brook will be regional director of the Western Region — the area not covered by the two outlined above — and his regional executive will be Mr G. Carruthers, with special responsibilities for the South Wales companies.
The Central Activities Group will be divided into a series of divisions, each to be headed by a general manager. The first two are the Express Services Division and the Holiday Tours Division. Later divisions will be developed to cover "other activities which are logically associated with the travel business".
NBC subsidiaries engaged exclusively in coaching (Greenslades Tours, Black and White, Samuelson New Transport, Timpsons and Sheffield United Tours) will initially be allocated to this group, and eventually the express and tours services run by other operating companies will come under the central group's control. But Mr Skyrme gave an assurance this week that company names would not disappear.
The NBC's central engineering, finance and administration sections are not affected by the restructuring.
All the general managers, regional executives and regional directors, together with senior headquarters executives, will be meeting in Leicester on April 12 for an NBC management conference at which the whole philosophy behind the reorganization will be expounded and discussed freely.
As a result of the new structure, two NBC regional chairmen will be retiring at the end of March, about two years ahead of their normal retirement dates. They are Mr Ian Patey, who joined Southern Vectis 31 years ago and has been, among other posts, director and g.m. of Bristol Omnibus, and chairman at various times of Tilling Association's Western and South Wales Regions and the NBC's Yorkshire and Midlands Regions; and Mr J. T. E. Robinson, who has worked in the bus industry for his whole 45-year career. He trained with West Yorkshire and after service with several companies became g.m. and a director of United Counties in 1955, and in 1964 took similar positions with Bristol Omnibus. He has been chairman successively of the NBC's South Western and South Wales and West Regions.