Bonanza for transport firm bosses

THE bosses of two companies running heavily subsidised bus and train services in London have both seen their pay packages soar through the £1m mark.

Phil White, chief executive of National Express, received £991,000 in salary, cash bonuses and company payments into his pension savings pot in 2004, augmented by cashing in share options that netted him £44,000.

In addition, during the year White was granted share options exercisable in two years' time which at current prices are worth £300,000.

Longer-standing share options granted at more-favourable prices have a notional worth of more than £1m to White while his existing 165,000 shares in the company are worth another £1.5m.

Last year profits from National Express's train operations leapt 75% to £58m. It runs the Silverlink services in north London, which last year received more than £50m of taxpayer handouts, as well as the One services out Liverpool Street and the Gatwick Express ,which have become so profitable that National Express has to hand back excess profit to the Treasury.

At London's biggest red bus operator, Arriva, chief executive Bob Davies saw his salary, cash bonus, perks and pension-fund payments rise to £894,000. Cashing in share options in recent months has netted Davies a further £315,000.

Arriva has 19% of the capital's bus market and the hundreds of millions of pounds that the mayor, Ken Livingstone, is throwing at London buses helped the company increase its bus profits by £5m last year to £62m.

Since his election in 2000 Livingstone has poured up to £500m a year into the capital's bus network, helping turn an annual increase in bus passenger journeys of about 3% into annual growth of about 8%.

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