ambassadors

Dai Powell

• Profile
• Blog
• News
• Images
• Speaker Profile (pdf)

---

London buses, school buses, harm reduction buses, minibuses – it’s all aboard for one of the UK’s leading social enterprises, HCT Group, and its boss Dai Powell

HCT Group is a thriving business – very different from the community transport provider that began life helping community groups with their transport in a London borough almost 30 years ago.

Back then, Social Enterprise Ambassador Dai Powell was a volunteer bus cleaner. Now he’s HCT’s chief executive, leading a company with 490 staff and a turnover topping £20 million, providing training and jobs for hundreds of long-term unemployed people and running transport services in the capital and Yorkshire.

HCT’s social goals are the driving force of the company, but Dai says they could not be achieved if HCT wasn’t making a profit. “You have to be an enterprise first, because if you don’t make a profit, you can’t fulfil that social mission,” he says.

The profit comes from contracts for commercial, school and community bus services won in competition with (often giant) operators in the private sector. In addition to its local authority services in London and Yorkshire, HCT runs four red bus routes for Transport for London (TFL), transporting almost 25,000 passengers a day. HCT even operates a harm reduction bus for London drug-users, allowing them to dispose of needles safely and get advice while doing so.

The profits from HCT’s commercial services – 97 per cent of HCT’s turnover – are ploughed back into delivering better community services.

“We operate in poor areas because that is where the greatest need is.

But we don’t provide poor services for poor people – the quality has to be there,” says Dai, also chair of the Community Transport Association (CTA).

“Helping someone have a more independent life, an elderly person out of isolation, a parent knowing their child is in safe hands, giving someone the skills and flexibility to get a job that suits them – these are all different destinations and what it comes down to for us.”

For HCT, the best price wins contracts and to ensure this, HCT must keep moving. Its rapid growth is due to merging with smaller community transport organisations and a track record of excellent quality. This and its unique business structure – incorporating charities, community interest companies, an industrial and provident society (IPS), companies limited by guarantee and one company limited by shares – has made it a pioneering social business.

“We have created a model that works for our mission and there is no one forcing us down a certain road, so we can be free to try new things,” says Dai. “Part of it is trial and error but, more importantly, it’s about a healthy attitude to risk – it you don’t have that, you won’t get anywhere.”

For Ian Seabrook, Assisted Transport Services Manager at TFL, HCT’s approach is delivering. “Working with HCT has helped TFL understand that providing a service can be about offering integrated forms of transport – a combination of services to meet the customer’s needs,” he says. 

---

Quick Facts

---

• HCTs commercial services allowed it to invest 18 per cent of its annual profits into non-commercial community transport in 2007/08. Its mission is to increase this to 30 per cent in the next five years.
• According to the contract, 88 per cent of HCTs Waltham Forest school bus service must be on time. HCT exceeds this target and delivers 99 per cent on time.
• HCT provides more than one million passenger journeys each year – that’s nearly 30,000 every day.

---

Share Print