NZ Bus offers to lift lockout

NZ Bus will lift its lockout notice and resume services on Thursday morning "as a gesture of good will", if the unions stop strike action and agree to reach a settlement, the company says.

But parents and school children still face another day of disruption tomorrow as a lockout of about 900 bus drivers in Auckland continues.

A statement from the company said it would remove the lockout notice but only on the "proviso that by 1:30pm tomorrow the unions also lift their strike notice and agree to work with the facilitator to reach a ratified settlement", NZ Bus operations general manager Zane Fulljames said.

Since Thursday NZ Bus and a coalition of four unions have been in facilitation with the Employment Relations Authority in order to resolve a long-standing pay dispute.

No NZ Bus services have run since then and the disruption became greater yesterday on the first day of the fourth school term.

The Auckland Combined Unions will meet with their members tomorrow at 11am to discuss developments.

Students and around 80,000 other commuters have had to find alternative transport to get to school or work.

Most travellers had coped by switching to trains, taking buses provided by other companies, car pooling or using their own cars.

But yesterday, with pupils returning after the school holidays, many of the buses used for public services last week were switched back to school routes.

An offer by the drivers to drive pupils for no pay was rejected by the company as "at best misguided and is at worst mischievous".

Frustrated passengers have been told to go to the Auckland Regional Transport Authority (Arta) website maxx.co.nz for alternatives.

Arta spokeswoman Sharon Hunter said it had scraped together a skeleton bus service and the trains into the city were packed.

She said the daily subsidy of $160,000 paid to NZ Bus had been suspended while the buses were not running.

Meanwhile Auckland Regional Council chairman Mike Lee has said the council would begin procedures to end its contract with NZ Bus if the lockout did not end by the end of the week.

"Like any commercial contract, NZ Bus contracts can be terminated for non-performance," Mr Lee said.

"If this dispute is not settled, I will be calling on Arta to start the process of terminating the existing contracts and finding someone else who will deliver the services that Auckland expects and pays for."

However, Arta spokeswoman Sharon Hunter said it would take up to two months to terminate the contract and it would be impossible to replace the bus service in that timeframe.

"If we terminated NZ Bus completely then we'd leave a 700-bus gap overnight, and we couldn't do that to the public," Ms Hunter said.

NZ Bus spokeswoman Megan McSweeney said Mr Lee's comments were "not helpful".

- Stuff.co.nz and NZPA