FirstGroup plc

Welcome to The Purposeful Strategist, a podcast about how business leaders are bringing their organization's purpose and strategy to life.

My guest today is Jeanette Bell, Managing Director of First Bus, the bus division of First Group PLC and one of the largest bus operators in Britain, running around a fifth of all bus services outside London across a fleet of more than 5,000 vehicles.

Jeanette joined First Bus in 2020, bringing a career that spans transport, energy and retail.

Before First Bus, she was CEO of P&O Ferries and held senior positions at Centrica.

She started her career in various commercial roles at Tesco.

She's led FirstBus through a period of significant change for the industry and brings to that challenge a perspective shaped by working across sectors whose mandates are both to generate commercial value and perform a public service.

Now, really glad to have you here.

If you can, maybe you can give us a sense.

Written by Xander Elliott and read by Billy Gordon From the National News Section Friday the 4th of September Glasgow locals baffled as bus drives up pedestrianised Buchanan Street Written by Aidan Maxwell Glasgow locals were left baffled after a bus driver took a wrong turn and drove onto Glasgow's Buchanan Street, which has been pedestrianised for almost 50 years.

First Bus has confirmed that one of its drivers accidentally drove onto the busy street after becoming confused by road closures elsewhere in Glasgow's city centre.

Photos shared with the Glasgow Times show a First Bus service travelling along Buchanan Street shortly after midnight on September 2nd.

The site stunned Glaswegians as Buchanan Street has been closed to ordinary traffic since 1972, making it one of the UK's longest established pedestrianised shopping streets.

Nowadays, the route is generally reserved for emergency vehicles and deliveries.

First bus confirmed the incident happened after the driver took a wrong turn while navigating road closures on Union Street.

A spokesperson said, We can confirm that one of our drivers of the number 3 service took a wrong turn on their route due to road closures on Union Street that evening.

As a result, the service was halted and passengers disembarked the vehicle.

Back in January, between Hitachi and Mitsubishi Bank, we have signed an overall global agreement to look at financing assets for charging infrastructure.

And now we had also some projects where we applied this model, for instance, in the UK with First Group.

And why I would say that there is a need is really this kind of SPV vehicle that you can build up to finance assets on behalf of commercial operators of buses, for instance, and trucks.

So buses and trucks.