Bus Industry Insights – Analysis and Commentary on Bus Safety, Transport Policy and Governance

Over the last few months I have been trying to answer what should be a fairly simple question. What actually happens to the consumer when a company behind a long-term domestic solar or battery arrangement fails? Who owns the equipment? Who maintains it? Who can demand money from the homeowner? What happens if the homeowner wants to sell or remortgage? What happens if the original contract cannot be found? What happens if rights are sold to another company? And most importantly of all: Who is actually responsible for protecting the consumer? The more information I have obtained, the clearer one thing has become. There is no simple answer. What I have found instead is a fragmented system, spread across different regulators, government departments, insolvency rules, consumer law, property law and contractual arrangements. And the worrying part is that many of these problems are not new. THE WARNING SIGNS WERE THERE YEARS AGO Two separate internal reviews by the Department for Business and...

I’m writing this on the train to Liverpool, heading up the evening before the UK Bus Summit 2026. Tomorrow, people from across the bus industry, local and regional government, passenger organisations, operators, technology companies and other parts of the transport sector will come together at The Spine in Liverpool. The timing feels important. Bus policy is changing quickly. Devolution is gathering pace. Franchising is moving from discussion into delivery in more areas. Enhanced Partnerships continue to evolve. Questions around funding, reliability, accessibility, affordability, safety and accountability are becoming increasingly important. And tomorrow’s programme reflects that. The UK Bus Summit will feature sessions on devolution, the future of urban and rural bus networks, and what the programme describes as the “non-negotiables” of reliability, accessibility, affordability and safety, alongside a keynote from Simon Lightwood MP, Minister for Buses and Local Transport. I’m looking...

For months I have been asking one question. When a green-energy business model collapses and homeowners are left with somebody else’s solar panels and batteries attached to their homes, long-term agreements, disputed property rights and no obvious way out, who is actually responsible? I still cannot get a straight answer But what I have now uncovered makes that question much more urgent. This is no longer only about looking backwards at Tomato Energy, Tomatopia and Senapt Assets. There is now a possible third-party transaction involving the Senapt portfolio. Before somebody acquires whatever rights, contracts and assets are said to exist, affected households deserve to know: WHO IS PROTECTING US? THE WARNING SIGNS GO BACK TO 2011 HM Land Registry documents obtained through Freedom of Information show officials were dealing with the growth of domestic solar airspace leases as far back as March 2011. They were already expecting potentially large numbers of applications and acknowledged t...