driver sentenced

Safety of coach passengers

Published:

THE carefully-crafted words of National Express Group chief executive Richard Bowker following the jailing of driver Philip Rooney look rather hollow when set alongside the full circumstances of the crash which killed three people on a London to Aberdeen coach in January last year.

Mr Bowker, in a statement bearing all the hallmarks of having been put together by a public-relations adviser specialising in damage limitation, expressed condolences to relatives of the dead and injured, thanked the emergency services for their help and stressed the importance the company placed on safety. It ended, predictably, with the “lessons will be learned” promise.

We have no doubt that Mr Bowker’s regret is entirely sincere and that the company will, indeed, review its safety procedures in the light of the incident and the remarks of the judge who yesterday sentenced Rooney to five years in jail.

What the families and public would like to know, however, is why Rooney was on the road in the first place, at the wheel of a coach carrying nearly 70 people on a journey covering more than 500 miles, almost exclusively of motorway and dual carriageway. For a start, he had five convictions for speeding and, although they were while driving private cars, they demonstrate a total lack of regard for motoring laws and, crucially, road safety.

If that were not bad enough, Rooney had also previously been warned by his employer for disabling a speed limiter on his vehicle so that he could drive faster. And in a touch of supreme, tragic irony, at the time of the accident he was taking a bend too fast while broadcasting over the vehicle loudspeaker system. None of these is the action of a man personifying his company’s commitment to the safety of its passengers.